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Innocence and magic
A generation ago, when I was just starting out in publishing, my first boss walked into my office and handed me copies of the then-current issues of Time (where I was working) and Newsweek. “Look at these and tell me how they were put together,” he said. “I’ll be back in half an hour.”
I looked at the two magazines with a mixture of anticipation and panic. Just out of business school, I felt as if I had won the lottery to be working at Time. But a week into the job, I knew nothing about how magazines were put together.
I fumbled around with the two copies for 30 minutes, made lots of notes and hoped for the best. My boss, Bob Hughes, had worked in the railroad business before becoming an operations manager with both Newsweek and Time, and I knew he would be back on time.
As the half hour lapsed, Bob walked back into my office, settled in the one chair that fit in front of my desk and said, “Tell me what you know.” I went back to my notes and showed him what I had found.
He listened patiently for what felt like an eternity but was probably ten minutes. When I was done, he nodded, reached for the magazines and said, “Good effort, but ... no.”
Bob picked up Time, flipped to the first bind-in insert card, folded the pages toward the cover and pulled the center of the issue apart from the staples. I’d been saving magazines for years, and he heard me gasp.
Laughing, not derisively, Bob said, “Relax. We can always make more.”
He went on to give me an extended lesson on how magazines are made and how you can figure it out even in a delivered copy. It’s an hour I remember to this day, one that changed how I look at printed publications.
Bob was always teaching someone something. In the short time I worked for him, he would stop me at least once a day with a quick, “Take a look at this.” Invariably, he would have found an example of something he already understood and wanted to be sure I did too, or something that surprised him and that he needed to share.
He took me on my first trip to a printing plant, an R.R. Donnelley facility in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Above the noise of the presses, he shouted at me to start at the back. “Everyone wants to look at the printed forms coming off a press, but if really you want to know about a printing plant, look at how well they handle the paper going in.”
As a boss, he had the precision of a railroad signal master and the curiosity of a child. I mean this purely: in the short time I worked for him, his eyes were always wide open.
A few months in, I made an error of omission that cost Time US$50,000 in a single weekend. By that time, Bob had taken a new role inside Time’s production group, and my new boss did not see it as a teachable moment. Bob sat quietly throughout the discussion, and when it started to turn ugly he said to no one in particular, “I’d have made the same decision if I’d been in Brian’s shoes.”
I’m not sure that’s true; mine was a rookie mistake. But he turned the meeting around and probably saved my career at Time Inc. (to the extent that it could have been saved).
Bob is retired now, and I don’t write this to put him on a pedestal or pretend that he didn’t have his eccentricities (he did). But he helped fill that summer, my first summer in publishing, with a sense of innocence and magic that many of us once felt for this business. I would like to have it back.
Posted by Michael Vagnetti
Yes! Thanks for sharing this anecdote.
Readers, and makers of books, want magic, to be delighted…they want art. Like you mention, part of that is the joy in how things are made well. I was at AIGA last night, an institution that exists to promote and preserve a certain conception of what that delight is. (Sometimes, a “graphic arts view” overvalues the resources given to the container side of a book, at its own expense.)
However, in the auditorium you could feel the ripples of interest in how different “parts” are increasingly required to keep this view of the art alive. Operations parts, workflow parts.
There’s a “context” for the customer, and maybe there’s an internal context, too, that’s slightly different for the publishing complex itself. A context about how things work - from insert cards to .epub - and where the “magic” you’re talking about is.
It’s interesting to think, then, about how your emphasis on the “context revolution” - for lack of a better phrase, although I kind of like it - is finding its way into the picture within publishing itself. Maybe how things are made is the new magic, or a different one, another view of “what makes a book beautiful.”
Posted by Brian O'Leary
What a lovely comment ... wow.
I worked in magazine and book operations for a long time, and those experiences inform a lot of what I write about. The ‘context’ piece to me is more evolutionary than revolutionary. We possess the tools that make it possible to preserve and extend content in a way that makes the end result “magical” for the reader. We’re just not using them fully yet.
Maybe what we need in publishing is a set of lessons in the art of the possible. That starts with understanding the reader and backs up from there.
Posted by Pamela Horn
Sitting in the same AIGA discussion last night, I was rather enjoying the tangible discomfort generated by the panel and the audience. The discord rampant in the publishing industry was visceral.
My heart dropped when a truly frightened graphic design student begged to know, if he had to learn anything in his remaining months at school to make him assuredly marketable, what would that be? (HTML5 was the hard and fast answer.) Good. That he could come away with some practical answers was comforting.
It was when the conversation went to the “true edges” of the text and of the content—that were most striking. We crave those edges that are mostly absent in our digital reading experiences. Is it really the edges that can be gripped or touched, or the layering of the creative process that generates the art? How was this made?
Craig Mod shared that he yearned for the reader’s notations and a history not evident from reading on his iphone. That was my moment of innocence and magic. Is there such a thing as digital palimpsest?
Posted by Brian O'Leary
I learn something new (and deepen my understanding of things I thought I knew) every time I listen to Craig Mod talk. I’m not sure anything I write here can compete.
I think we can lament the quality of the tools we have at our disposal without always realizing that they improve largely through use and attempts at use. As tools spread from artisans to a broader spectrum (composition and typography, as examples), we lament the potential loss of a subset of skills (in these cases, graphic arts).
As the tools develop, so too do the ways we think about using them. A decade ago, the “swiping” metaphor that Craig talked about beautifully at Books in Browsers was unknown. Now, it shows up in commercials for Coors beer.
While we don’t have the next-generation answer for how writers and readers will interact around the “book”, the next section of “Futurist’s Manifesto”, the book I am editing with Hugh McGuire, includes several essays that I think start to get at those questions. We hope to have it out next month, around the time of Tools of Change.
As for digital palimpsests ... I think digital in itself may be the answer. The challenge going forward may be preserving, not wiping clean.
Posted by James Kane
This is, without a doubt, one of your best blog posts. Maybe not for those who like reading your thoughts on the state of the publishing industry or your position on piracy issues. But on behalf of the sentimental saps out there who love a good story about the things and people that matter most, this gets our vote.
Posted by Brian O'Leary
Thank you 
I’ve made a commitment, good to date, to post “something useful every day” in 2012. I started to feel as if a steady diet on the state of publishing was getting a bit old. When I woke up a couple of days ago with David Gray’s song lyric in my head, I decided to try telling this story.
A couple of people have told me elsewhere that they read it as a remembrance, which left them sad. The last line, though, isn’t wistful: I didn’t say that I wished I could have it back. I feel we have it in ourselves to create the reality we want. That’s a message I have heard you offer, as well.