From the Boat
Dear all,
The weather at this latitude is, as it has been for some weeks now, a matter of considerable personal satisfaction. I shall not say where we are. I will say only that the light falls at an angle that reminds one that light, properly understood, is a form of editorial judgment. The Margaret IV rides low, which she has always done when carrying too many newspapers, and this morning I worked through a stack of them that arrived by the supply tender on or around the twenty-third of last month. One item arrested me entirely. A columnist for a paper I will not name (it is printed on paper so thin I can read both sides simultaneously, which I believe is their intention) declared that the publishing industry is, and I quote, "figuring out what it wants to be." I set the paper down. I poured a small amount of something warming. The publishing industry, I submit, has known what it wants to be since at least the Council of Trent, and if it has misplaced that knowledge it is welcome to wire the Margaret IV, though I cannot promise a timely reply, as we are making four or five knots in an agreeable direction.
It is, I note, nearly forty years since the staff retreat of 1986, which we held, if I recall correctly, at a lodge in northern Vermont that cost eleven dollars a night per person, fully serviced, including the canoe. Margaret had insisted we go in September, which was her month, she always said, the one month where the world had the decency to make its intentions plain before it went ahead and frosted everything anyway. She was right. She was right about most things pertaining to weather, typography, and the irreversible nature of certain editorial commitments. We sat around a table for three days and argued about girth. About what it meant to be a publication of substance. About whether substance could be quantified. By the third day we had resolved nothing, and the canoe had a crack in it, and everyone went home on the bus, and the enterprise was better for all of it.
I have received Bart's recent numbers for the autumn run, and I have received them with what I will characterize as measured equanimity. The decision to reduce the secondary margin notation on entries of considerable mass is, I think, a choice made in haste and one that Margaret, the typeface, would not have survived without protest. She was a wide face. She was designed to hold weight. I have said this to Bart by post, twice, and I trust he is working through his correspondence. Bart is a good editor. I back him entirely. That is compatible with being correct.
There was an advertisement, I believe it ran in 1971 or possibly 1973, for a brand of office furniture, and the copy read as follows: "Built for the man who has already decided." I have thought about that line for fifty years. I believe it is the finest description of publishing I have ever encountered in any medium. Built for the man who has already decided. We decided in 1974. In a Manhattan office, sixty-two dollars a month, fully serviced. The radiator knocked all winter and we considered it percussion.
The light is changing now, which means the afternoon is doing what afternoons do at this latitude in this month, which is to say it is becoming something one feels rather than sees. The Margaret IV is steady. The enterprise must carry on.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea