From the Boat
Dear all,
The weather at this latitude is, as it has been for the better part of a fortnight, exemplary. I will not say more than that, as I have found that describing good weather to those who are not experiencing it constitutes a form of cruelty for which I have no appetite, particularly in autumn, when a Manhattan office receives very little direct sunlight and the radiators produce that particular smell of ambition slowly cooking. I mention this not to be unkind but because a newspaper arrived three weeks ago, a copy of the Tribune from early September, and its front page carried a photograph of a street in the city that appeared both wet and resigned. The people in it were wearing that expression common to those who have accepted the weather as a personal verdict. I felt for them. Briefly.
The newspaper also carried, buried in its culture pages, a small notice about the renewed public appetite for, and I am quoting from memory here, "words of considerable presence and weight." I read this sentence three times. I thought: we said this in 1974. We said it from a Manhattan office that cost sixty-two dollars a month, fully serviced, and we built an enterprise around the saying of it. There was an advertisement, a competitor's advertisement, that appeared in several publications around 1971, which read, and I have never forgotten it: "Big ideas deserve big words. Communicate with authority. Communicate with power. Communicate with VOLUMINOSITY." I remember thinking at the time that VOLUMINOSITY was precisely the kind of word we were in business to celebrate, even if the people using it in the advertisement had no idea why. Perhaps especially then.
I think of the 1986 staff retreat, which we held in a rented lodge outside Montauk, the one with the broken furnace, and the evening when Margaret spread the galleys across the floor and we sat around them with our drinks and argued, with great affection and great seriousness, about whether a word of sufficient girth required a longer definition or a shorter one. She said shorter. She was correct. She was frequently correct. I have been thinking about that evening more than usual this week, though I cannot say precisely why, except that the water here has a particular quality of stillness that invites it.
Bart's recent decision to run the synonyms in a smaller point size is one I would not have made. I have told him so, in a memo posted some weeks ago, the reply to which I am still awaiting, accounting for the post. He has good instincts and I trust them. I simply note, for the record, that Margaret the typeface was designed with generous leading for a reason, and that reason was legibility, and that reason has not expired. I back him fully. I mention it only once. This is me mentioning it only once.
The enterprise, which began as a kind of argument and has continued as a kind of argument and will very likely conclude, in some distant era I do not intend to witness, as a kind of argument, must carry on.
Bertram Whitmore
Publisher, At Sea