It’s Not Always Bucolic

Last month brought a neighbor’s tree down and this month it’s ours. Just missed the boat but it crushed the seawall.

Evans’ Rag

Vol 2 Issue 3

Quite Possibly Last Night

Quite possibly last night, if my eyes weren’t as tired as they were and the light less dim, I would have overlooked the problem entirely but as it was they were and it was, so I didn’t. Got it?

The subject under discussion is an old fashion rag–as in a print version newspaper. Like the troglodytes I work hard to emulate, I still carry subscriptions to the Washington Post and the New York Times, the latter primarily for their Sunday book reviews. So I was reading and not totally registering a book review; the text was getting blurry.

When the Times’ quarterly “T” Style Magazine is dropped like a full-colored brick in the driveway, I do what any rational person believing fashion is dancing with the transitory and thus unnecessary, I lose it in the recycling, mainly to reach the Book Review. Though I digress…

For myself I can be dated easily enough by taking note of this newsletter’s title, Evans’ Rag. Naming it ‘newsletter’ was lame-sounding. And yes, I left off the second “s” in the possessive case because it has less graphic appeal than the bare apostrophe “s” We creative types expect the world to accede to our peculiarities, writers being prime examples. However, that’s not the point of this piece.

And I have heard the particular tree species furnishing the paper have steadily declined in parallel with the income from newsprint ads. It’s becoming a desperate situation for newspaper tree farms to where they are largely becoming pulp fiction. However the joke, that too is not the point of this piece.

Newspapers, evolving from the time of adjustable type set in wooden cradles to present day, traditionally have divided their articles into columns of text. Columns, each one and a fraction of an inch wide and at a 6-point font equaling an average smattering of words per line. Like this.

So on average, every
four or so lines of trun-
cated text, the typeset-
ters (now the grem-
lins dwelling inside com-
puters) employ hypen-
ated words spanning
one line to the next
thusly.

The New York Times, that venerable creature of the golden age of typesetting, continues to insist on four columns of text per Book Review page, not three, not two and god help us never one. Though their “T” Style Magazine isn’t constrained in this manner, so are the fashionistas actually more evolved? Evidently advertising ridiculously expensive ‘timepieces’–not watches–pays for better layouts. One doesn’t own these timepieces but cares for them to hand down to the next generation. It’s true; I read it in “T”.

“You never actually own a Patek Philippe… “ God, that just brings tears to my eyes. I want to be buried with mine and screw the kids.

Gay Talese’s book, The Kingdom and the Power explained a great deal about the Times, probably more than the family publishers cared to admit. Including the bit about the copywriter who was fired for publishing Joyce’s Ulysses serial style in the obituaries during the time it was banned from publication in the US. Where was the editor’s sense of humor, you might ask? But glaring as this present problem is, even Talese never discussed the case of multiple hyphenations.

Pages of newsprint with 4 columns means two margins and three column ‘gutters’ per line of text, which is pleasing enough viewed from a distance of several yards, but is a royal pain in the retinas when native eyeballs of an aging variety are forced to span these brief lines hoping to draw forth intelligent thought from the writers.

Is there no one who sees the evil in this kind of ageism?

No, no, no! I’m not talking about computers verses Gutenberg, and by the way the Gutenberg bible is on sale on Amazon today with free delivery if you’re a Prime member. I wonder if you can buy a Patek Philippe on Amazon. If I had been a carver of wooden letters back in the time of Martin Luther, no doubt I’d be thankful enough for a short column length.

And if I read all my news, social commentary and book reviews on a tee-niny screen walking off into traffic while pushing my baby’s stroller and talking the while to my personal financial advisor (as opposed to the impersonal one) as to the wisdom of investing in Patek Philippe, this whole thing would escape me, like the Land Rover brushing my hips while denying said offspring a long enough life to inherit the damn watch. After a while, it all begins to cohere.

And we troglodytes wearing Timex ‘timepieces’ deserve to be heard.

Gene Weingarten’s story in this week’s Washington Post rants away about the new age of one space used between sentences instead of two. (SquareSpace doesn’t give you a choice; it’s one or none.) Like that’s going to save space? Or the extra keystroke is wasting precious electrons? I liken that to poor graphics and an ignorance of tradition.

See how fast I can switch arguments?