From the Boat
Dear all,
The weather at this latitude is, as it has been for some weeks now, the kind of weather that rewards patience and punishes ambition. A low grey sky, which I find preferable to the theatrical blue skies one encounters closer to shore, where everything conspires to make you feel you ought to be doing something. I am doing something. I am writing this. The Margaret IV rocks with a steady and considered authority, and the light through the porthole falls across the page at precisely the angle one reads about in novels without ever expecting to encounter. I encounter it daily. I do not remark upon it, except now, and then only briefly.
A newspaper arrived on the tender three weeks past, dated to the middle of August, and in it I read that someone of consequence had said something about the future of print publishing. I have not retained the name, as names in newspapers tend toward the disposable. What I retained was the tone, which was the tone of a man explaining to a lighthouse that electricity had been invented. The enterprise has been explaining substance, girth, and considerable mass since 1974, from an office on the ninth floor of a building whose name I never bothered to learn, at sixty-two dollars a month, fully serviced, coffee included on Tuesdays. We did not require the validation of August newspapers then. We do not require it now.
I think of the 1986 staff retreat in, I believe it was Montauk, though Phyllis Cramer maintained afterward that it was Amagansett. It was Montauk. We had rented a house with a porch that faced east, and Margaret sat on that porch for the better part of two mornings, reading galley proofs, making notes in the margin with a pencil she kept behind her ear. The staff were afraid of her, which is the correct response to someone doing the work properly. I have tried to remember what we decided at that retreat and cannot, but I remember the proofs came back cleaner than anything we published that decade.
I have received Bart's September selections. I will say only that the third entry under the category of Of Considerable Vertical Presence strikes me as insufficiently sourced, and that the accompanying illustration, which I am told was chosen for its, quote, contemporary legibility, unquote, looks like something one might find in an airline magazine. I have written Bart a separate note. I trust Bart. I have always trusted Bart. I trusted him when I hired him in, I believe, 1993, and I trust him now, even when he is wrong.
There was an advertisement I read once, in 1971 or thereabouts, in a magazine of the general-interest variety, that went: "Some things are built to last. Most things are not. The ones that last know the difference." I have quoted this before and will quote it again. Someone was selling furniture. Possibly cars. The sentiment, regardless of the object being sold, belongs to the enterprise. It has always belonged to the enterprise, and it will continue to belong to it long after the rest of August has finished explaining electricity to lighthouses.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea