Jeremy Filsell, the celebrated organist choir music director (the job was called choirmaster in my day), had opposed this idea around on the grounds that you can’t really have a boy choir without having a choir school. The classroom is essential to the family community of the small school. Moreover, the intensity of the singing experience requires the integration of scholarship and music.

Saint Thomas is the last choir school in the US. There are still twenty Anglican cathedral schools with choirs that include boys, but only one has a choir school: Westminster Abbey. The oldest, and the best.

Filsell is leaving Saint Thomas in five months,  at the end of the school year. In my view he’s the best choirmaster since the first, founder, T. Tertius Noble—although many would pick Gerre Hancock, who had a great 30-year run at the end of 20th century. In any case, he is the directorial bookend of this remarkable institution.

Alumni friends agree that to bring life this particular music, the sacred choral works by Palestrina, Tallis, Handel, Grieg,Williams, and Britten, there for a boy choir to reach its to continue without a leader like Filsell—working and living in a special environment.

Is this worth preserving? Is this level of excellence an indispensable part of the culture of New York? It has been since that Gilded Age when parishioners of Saint Thomas strolled down Fifth Avenue from their mansions.
That elite moved on, and there are many who question whether we want elites, or at least one made of privileged white boys. Okay, it is a boy choir. That’s the idea. But take a look at the ethnic mix today in this picture.

It has been nearly 60 years since I graduated from the school. And if you think of time and decades, century is a pretty good run. The magazine business, which I was a part of most of my life, has not lasted much longer. But there are publishers with new business models, making excellent magazines.

But may there may still be a way to save Saint Thomas as choir school: As an independent school, with a relationship to the church but not owned by it. Compared to Julliard, or the Philharmonic, this cultural institution does not have a big budget. What we need is a small group of philanthropists who believe in the idea.

The church’s plan to take the “school” out of the choir school won’t fill the pews. Membership in the U.S. Episcopal Church peaked around the time I was a choirboy at around 30 million. It’s half that today. And while the New York church is full on Easter Sunday, losses mount as the endowment declines. Capital was spent on giant new organ case, with carving and lettering that would make architect Bertram Goodhue turn in his crypt (uptown at the Church of the Intercession).

The current rector, Carl Turner, has added a Catholic sheen to the interior, gilding finials on the historic woodwork, colorizing stone bas reliefs, and loading the altar with candlesticks and flowers.
The up-church ritural and pomp may attract some tourists, but that won’t pay the overhead. In another ten years, the parish administration may decide to move the parish to cheaper quarters. At that point, maybe another set of philanthropists will step in to repurpose the Goodhue monument. What a great gallery Saint Thomas would make! The Museum of American Gothic.

https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/a.asp?a=A17973

Dear Choir School Alumni and Families,

It is with great excitement that I share a momentous step forward for the Saint Thomas community. Today, the Vestry announces the successful preservation of the Choir School through an academic collaboration with the Professional Children’s School in New York. This partnership secures a sustainable future for the Choir School and Choir of Men & Boys while preserving the values, mission, and unique choral heritage we cherish. This decision comes after 18 months of prayerful work to develop a plan to address the budget deficit while protecting the spiritual and financial well being of the institution as a whole.

In May 2023, the Vestry, clergy, and senior lay staff gathered for a three-day retreat to review the 2019 Strategic Plan and envision the post-pandemic future of Saint Thomas Church, focusing on finally addressing the long-standing financial deficit in the operating budget and unsustainable funding model for the Choir School, which has strained the unrestricted General Fund for decades. In December 2023, the Vestry responded to concerns about the General Fund’s erosion by cutting nearly $1 million from the church’s operating budget and postponing capital projects. Music expenses remain a significant cost, comprising almost half of the church’s $14 million budget, and more than 50% when adding other administrative costs. To ensure fiscal sustainability, the Vestry considered closing the Choir School but instead entered a period of discernment to explore alternative financial models. Since March, this process has included broad community engagement and consultation with Carney Sandoe & Associates. The church has appreciated the commitment shown by community members and budget-holders throughout this process.

The time has come for change, in order for us to be fiscally responsible in the medium-term so that we can grow our invested funds, build on them, and live towards a more sustainable future long-term.

The Vestry has now had time to reflect on the various models put forward by the Sustainability Task Force and we have come to a decision.  We believe that the Collaboration Model with Professional Children’s School (PCS) offers the best way forward to preserve our unique choral heritage in a modern world while putting the church on a path to financial sustainability. 

We are not calling this the ‘partnership model’ anymore because our two schools will not be merging; rather, PCS will provide the core academic instruction to our students, while we retain a residential Choir School built on religious principles, centered on the liturgical life of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue.

Any change is hard – we recognize that – but we also believe that these careful plans are the beginning of something fresh and new, yet retaining all that we hold dear, including a Choir School that is a home-away-from-home for those who live, learn, and sing there. Many alumni have told me about the transformative experience they had at Saint Thomas Choir School. By retaining the boarding program, the rigorous musical and liturgical training, and the nurturing atmosphere of our small community, the collaboration with PCS will make those transformative experiences available to new generations of choristers.

Let there be no doubt: the Christian character of our school will remain as vibrant and central as ever.  Our boys will continue to be nurtured in an environment that includes liturgy, prayer and spirituality, an exploration of Christian ethics and morals, and all rooted in the study of the Bible, and lived out in the Anglican tradition. In addition to our boarding staff, we will continue to employ a School Chaplain who will not only have a pastoral role but will continue to be responsible for ensuring the teaching of Theology and preparing children for Baptism, Holy Communion and Confirmation. We will continue to offer classical lessons such as Latin. The clergy team will continue to support the House Parents and School Chaplain in all aspects of our school’s life.

Music, of course, will continue to be at the heart of the academic life of our school, and this will mainly be taught in the Choir School, as well as at PCS. Instrumental lessons and vocal lessons will continue to have their important place alongside choir practice.

The Professional Children’s School is renowned for nurturing talented young artists and has a long history of successful partnerships with organizations such as the School of American Ballet (SAB). We are confident that our boys will receive exceptional support from a school that understands the unique and demanding needs of artistic and dedicated students.

Next steps:

Looking forward, we are thrilled to work closely with parents, staff, and PCS to bring this vision to life. Together, we will fine-tune the day-to-day schedule for our choristers, enhancing both their academic and musical experiences while maintaining the structure that has served our school so well. Mother Alison Turner, our Choir School Chaplain and a life-long educator, has been appointed Interim Director of Transition, formally commencing in January 2025, and will be dedicated to supporting our community at every step, ensuring this process is as seamless and enriching as possible.

• We will continue to consult with the parents of our choristers to ensure that they fully understand what will change, and what will not change in the day-to-day life of a chorister, so that with confidence, they can re-enroll their boys for the academic year 2025-26.
• We will be discussing with our current faculty and staff next steps, as we recognize the significant changes this model will present to some of them.
• We will be working with PCS to ensure that appropriate staffing will be provided for Grades 4 and 5 going forward (PCS will re-open those grades in its school).
• We will cease admitting boys into Grade 3; it is helpful to remember that Grade 4 only began in 1998 and Grade 3 was introduced in 2007.
• Meetings have been held for some weeks now exploring the day-to-day life of the choristers and how PCS can support their academic needs, while allowing the same amount of time for their choir training, and the (on-average) five liturgical services a week plus concerts.
• We will advise our accrediting body, The New York Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS), how these changes will be implemented and their consequences.  We will continue to remain affiliated to the Choir Schools Association, and hope that our long association with the National Association of Episcopal Schools, and The Association of Boarding Schools will also continue.
• We will discuss with the current Board of Trustees a plan for a formal ending of that Board, and the creation of a new governance body with an appropriate constitution from September 2025.
• Finally, the Vestry resolution makes clear that we expect work to begin in earnest to form a separate girls’ choir; this may very well be in collaboration with another school. Furthermore, we expect that the success of the Noble Singers will serve as an impetus to increase our musical outreach into the local community, thus sharing what we treasure with as wide a group of children as possible.
At a time when the choral tradition that we have inherited from the cathedrals and collegiate chapels of England remains under threat, and so many English cathedrals are struggling with the exact same financial problems as we are, the Vestry hopes that this solution will actually strengthen and grow our unique choral heritage.

So that there can be no doubt – this is the first stage in making our finances sustainable in the long-term.  The Annual Appeal will continue to be hugely important to the well-being of our parish going forward; the investment committee will continue to give a strong lead in our fiscal planning; the importance of the Noble and Duffie Guilds cannot be overstated. At the same time, we are thinking about new revenue streams, and strengthening our programs so that Saint Thomas remains a beacon for as wide a group of people as possible.

Because some of you will be thinking this, let me state it – we may fail in our endeavors.  Recruitment has always been a challenge for us at Saint Thomas even with the parish paying 89% of the $4 million cost of the school, and we will need to recruit boys to this new model which is, of course, not yet tested. Time will tell, but we are committed to making this work. As I have said many times, I did not come to New York ten years ago to close the Choir School – it is something I have cherished. If we hold our nerve, move forward in hope, and work together, we can only strengthen our resolve. If we pull back, or are fearful of this change, we will not engender that hope.

Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude for the dedication and professionalism of our existing Head of School, Christopher Seeley, and the Choir School faculty and staff. Their commitment to nurturing the boys musically, academically, and spiritually has been nothing short of exceptional, and they have been the heart and soul of the Choir School. We recognize that the foundation they have built is what makes this next chapter possible, and we are immensely thankful for their unwavering devotion to the mission of Saint Thomas.

We will be holding some further meetings to answer peoples’ questions as we move forward, and I ask for your continued support so that we can continue to worship, love, and serve our Lord Jesus Christ through the Anglican Tradition and our unique choral heritage.

Sincerely,
The Rev. Canon Carl F. Turner, Rector
and on behalf of the Vestry

We just lost a great observer, Vincent Winter (1947-2024). He took it all in—and then brought it back out in strong type and incisive photos.

I was able to work with him for more than twenty years, first at Rolling Stone where he appeared in the art department bullpen in 1975. He was a Californian; he went to school at San Francisco State, but then set off to Africa with his partner-in-life, Martine. On their return they seemed, like nomads, to be ready to resume the journey at any time.

Vincent was small in stature and stood with a slight bend. He always dressed like a well-traveled bohemian, with Well fitted jackets that seemed to come from Paris or maybe Morocco and interesting boots that were broken in but always shined. His silvery eyes had a slight twinkle as though he found all the proceedings vaguely amusing. He had a big head with a leonine shock of white hair—in his 20s. The look served him well, since he never seemed to age.

In the first year at Rolling Stone he was quickly promoted to assistant art director, then associate art director; and ne and Martine moved with the magazine to New York in 1977. As chief art director, I was never one to hand out sketches for staffers to implement. We collaborated . . . on the theory that two heads are better than one.

This was not always easy. We would argue like a crazy family. Every image, every typeface, every layout were challenged. I would start something, then Vincent would take it, and soon he would run back into my office, shouting, “Why don’t you try this?”

He put a name to the typographical style we were developing: “Old-style Constructivism.” We started with a traditional, bookish page, using old typefaces from elegant 1920s revivals of Venetian Latins to clumsy strong 19th century wood types, and then turned them on their sides, sometimes literally. We’d take the Modern grids and corrupt them with sweet fonts that Herbert Bayer would never use. The result was somehow fresh. Graphic design is all about tension, and we created energy by driving contemporary shapes and esthetics into traditional pages.

Other good designers, attracted by this energy, joined us. But for me there was no one like Vincent to work with. He helped me understand what I was trying to do. We improved each other constantly. The result was published work that neither of us could have done alone.
_ _ _

After Rolling Stone, he worked as an art director for other magazines in New York, including Newsweek’s Inside Sports. In the mid-80s he moved with Martine to Paris, where he quickly became part of the design scene. He already spoke French and his work energetically showed the essential connections between language, culture, and type.

We set up a studio called WB Associées. My partnerships in other countries, like Danilo Black in Mexico, put the local partner first in the name, but Vincent thought “Winter Black” was a double négatif, like “nuclear winter.”

Business was good, and in 1995 we opened the Paris branch of Interactive Bureau to design websites. During the heady media years at the end of 20th century, Vincent and Martine organized a jamboree for all of our partners from Europe and the Americas—more than 20 print and digital designers including some from the Font Bureau.

The venue was a beautiful chateau near Chartres. The gala dinner was in a nearby abbaye, but Vincent wanted more fun, and so he charted a small fleet of hot air balloons, one for each country. He said, “We should have a race!” Then he considered that might be dangerous, so he proposed that we race the clock. “The balloon wins that goes the farthest before sunset!” Well, we did it. It was hard to find everyone in the dark, and no one remembers who won. But no one who was there will forget the hot air balloon race.
_ _ _

No one who knew him will forget Vincent.

_ _ _

Many designers fall into their line of work after trying fine art or writing. Vincent did both and was successful at both, and that was not all. His photographs were published in beautiful books, and he had one-man shows in galleries. He even to his poetry published, for God’s sake. But it was in typographic design, the intersection of language, culture, and art that he was home.

If there were dreams unfulfilled, it is because he never stopped dreaming. He kept exploring . . . and observing. He never failed, yet he often felt unsatisfied. Not because he did not go all over the world, but because he was always ready to go someplace new.

_____________

Photo: Courtesy Martine Winter. Spread from Rolling Stone: 1978.

[  ] Yes
[  ] No

Without thinking for more than a second I checked “no,” filled in the line for my phone number, stuffed the letter into the stamped, addressed envelope that was provided, and tossed it into my out basket.
It didn’t think about it again, until two weeks later the phone rang, and it was David Hawk. He explained that he was trying to rebuild energy in the anti-war movement, since the war was still raging, thousands of Americans were dying in Vietnam, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were turned to refugees, wounded, or killed.
Hawk had mailed a that questionnaire to the NSA’s list of a thousand student body presidents and student newspaper. He realized that if enough of these “student leaders” announced they would refuse induction, then it would have some impact on Congressmen, many of whom were student body presidents, and on the national press core, many of whom had been editors of student newspapers.
More than 300 had signed the pledge, Hawk said, and the plan was to make an announcement in Washington, and demand to see the President. He asked, “Would you be willing to be one of the signers at the press conference.”
Of course, I said.
The date, Hawk said, was Tuesday, April 22. He expected that Allard Lowenstein, who had organized the “children’s crusade” for McCarthy and had been elected to Congress (D, NY-5), was going to get us room in the Capitol for a press conference. The NSA would provide airfare and a hotel room. “Not the Hay Adams,” he said.
Mondays were closing days at The Maroon, so I took a late flight to Washington to meet up with a dozen signers and run through the program. I found them all in a big suite at the Statler Hilton. Hawk came up to me and said, “Welcome. By the way, the group has chosen you as the spokesman.” (This taught me never to be late for a meeting like this.)
They took me through the announcement, basically a press release, and after reading it the plan was to open up for questions. I immediately, said, “No, no. Everyone’s got make their own statement.”
Hawk had put together a diverse group, with students from Ivy League colleges, big state universities, small liberal arts colleges—and two black schools. If each of us makes a short, impassioned, statement, it will get coverage in your local paper and on your local TV station, even if they don’t have correspondents in Washington.
There was some push back. The student pols said there wasn’t enough time. I said, sure there is. “Imagine you are Thomas Jefferson the night before they released the Declaration. Put down the first thing that comes to your mind. Explain your causes, your emotions. And make it short!”
Well, they all sat down and quickly produced strong and really moving pledges.
Lowenstein had secured the Agriculture Committee Room, one of the oldest in the House. We filed in and took the members seats on a big curved wooden dais like the Supreme Court.
The statements worked. We had the national press corps (junior grade), and at least four TV cameras. We hit a lull in the news, and we connected with the press, as Hawk planned. My mother Eleanor was delighted that my picture was on the front page of the Washington Post, and she agreed with my stand. My dad, not so much.
The next day the White House sent word to the NSA that they would meet with us. Not Nixon, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Counsel John Ehrlichman. They set a 90-minute meeting for the next Tuesday, April 29. And we all said we would be there.
With intended irony, the meeting was in the Situations Room in the basement of the White House. It was the room where Lyndon Johnson famously met with his staff and the Pentagon brass to review tactics for the War in Vietnam. Prof. Kissinger, who liked to be called Dr. Kissinger, held forth like he was in his classroom at Harvard dealing with stubborn (and probably stupid) students.
What I always will remember was his statement: “If the war is still going on a year from now, we will have no moral argument against you.”
Kissinger left after a half hour, and Ehrlichman took over, like the bad cop he was. He said that if we “persisted in refusing induction, we will bust you just like you ran a red light.” He got angrier and tougher as the meeting when on, suggesting in essence that the death penalty was too good for us.
Then it was over, and we went up to the press lobby and now we had the attention of the senior press corp. I remember Mary McGrory from the Washington Post. I read day-old Wapos in the Harper Library in Chicago, and admired her political coverage. The give and take with the press was good, and friendly, but then there were some cries coming through a door open to the Rose Garden, “Bring them out here.” It was the TV reporters, with their crews, who were close to deadline for the evening news.
We were herded outside, and then, as spokesmen, I was pushed to the front of the group. There was a semi-circle of microphones on stands, and then one of the reporters stepped right in front and pushed a big mike with a foam cover into may face. He said, “Dan Rather, CBS News.”
And I was on!
Watching the clip now, I have ask, what is that accent? I’m not sure who I was channeling, but it came out okay. I quoted Kissinger’s “no moral argument” remark. Then each of the group came forward and made some quick comments, and we answered questions. We got on national TV!
After a break, we went back to the hotel to make calls to local papers for “exclusives.” I got in the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle/
The next morning I was on the Today Show. The Washington correspondent, Richard Valeriani, met me at WRC, the NBC-owned station. And then I went over to the Post’s WTOP to be interviewed by Martin Agronsky, who had his own show.
And we made the point. Nixon had tried to upstage our White House meeting with a big attack on the college unrest, saying that protestors were “terrorizing” other students and faculty. The Times gave this the lede on the front page, and our story was tucked in at the end. But the Post and others put us on the front.
But the war continued for four more years. In the next month, the secret bombing of Cambodia was revealed. Many of our resistor group were sidetracked by the student sit-ins and strikes on their campuses. David Hawk went on to be one of the organizers of the Moratoriums, the biggest anti-war demonstrations of them all. He did not get away from the war for a long time, and after the US withdrawal he spent many years living in Cambodia, raising aid money, and managing how it was spent.
While the war victims in Southeast Asia and in the US military are the real witnesses to this horrible, unjustified war. No one knows the consequences better than Hawk. And the government has never learned the lesson.
For me, I knew I had hit home with my effort, when that Christmas I was back in Midland visiting family for Christmas. There was a dinner at the country club, and I sat next to one of my cousins, Ed Black. He asked me if I was holding to my pledge to resist induction. I said, yes. He said, “Do you know what we do to people like you down here?” I said, “What?” He pointed up to a big wooden beam running across the vaulted ceiling.
“We’d hang you from the highest rafters!”

[photos]

Roger Black : The legacy is in the details

I could never find Judy Lewellen, the copy chief; the artist Brian Davis; the photographer Jed Wilcox; the great writers John Kaye and Tom Moran; reporter Janie Greenspun (now Jane Gale); or Paul Cheslaw who had been at Print Project Amerika and was the promotion manager at LA with the title, Minister of Propaganda.
But, during the weekend before Halloween, ten of the survivors met at David Stick’s house in West LA—and for several great meals outside (literally) including a dinner in Santa Monica at the beautiful garden of Michael’s, a classic 70s restaurant that came along seven years after the newspaper. Another seven joined by Google Meet.

_ _ _

The general conclusion was that LA was a great experiment, and much better than anyone remembered. And why? Most credited Karl Fleming with a great eye for talent. This sounds self-serving, since we were the ones hired, but his choices all proved their talents later.
The staff quickly jelled into a team with energy and enthusiasm. We egged each other on.
Fleming and Sherrill, with their instincts and practiced judgement, kept handing out interesting assignments. They were triangulating The New Yorker, New York magazine, and the Village Voice. They wanted some hard news. They wanted service. But most of all they wanted good powers of observation and good writing. Cardoso was their Tom Wolfe, their Hunter S. Thompson, but everyone jumped in. Stories came in about (to name a few) the Crips, Tony and Susan Alamo, the Manson family, Coppola, Lassie, Monti Rock III, Mayor Yorty, abortions, Tim Leary, Oscar Levant, Leon Russell, a roller derby queen, Nixon, Terry Moore, the Queen Mary, Gram Parsons, Mose Allison, and,  of course,  Joan Didion. Plus book and rock music reviews, and a service section edited by Anne Taylor Fleming with items on the best food, shops, galleries, and events from the who LA area—all brightly and briefly written.
Fleming and Sherrill line-edited every piece, but the key to getting so much good writing and reporting was a combination of high expectations and great freedom. They assumed you were going to do a good job, and you tried as hard as you could.
This was especially true for the design. My only experience as a manager in a publication was my year as editor of a college newspaper (The Chicago Maroon) in 1968, the one-issue run of Print Project Amerika in 1970, and five issues of the Mayday newspaper in 1971.
Karl Fleming assumed I knew what I was doing, or else was too busy doing everything else. Reporters from his generation didn’t have to think much about layout. It was all being taken care of.
In the 60s there was an idea that publications could be organized as collectives. This did not work at the Mayday project, but I liked the collaboration. Two heads are better than one.  Instead of a separate pasteup group the three designers in the art department did their own pasteup from their own layouts. Sometimes, they could work from a half-size sketch that we agreed on, and just ordered a stat of the photo, set the headline and got a stat to the right size, and waited for the type repros to arrive.
We were thinking about making a newspaper that was more like a magazine. The first thing was to think of the issue as a series of spreads. Stories could run from page to page without newspaper jump lines (“Continued on page 12”). The layout was done in units of columns, and the ads were stacked vertically. I tried running headlines over the gutter to tie a story together. It never worked.
The copy was so late every week, that we didn’t have much time to argue about the layouts. The only big fight we had was over the size of the logo. (I lost.) But Fleming took specific interest in the photography. He took a number of LA pictures himself. At the beginning, we tried a couple of regulars, but he wasn’t happy with the results.
David Strick, a Cal Arts student, had come in on one assignment. Strick recalled at the reunion that I held a shape-up for the early issues, where a bunch of photographers would come to office, and I’d hand out assignments. Fleming liked the results and wanted to interview Strick. He hired him, and when he found out he was living at home, he offered $75 a week, and Strick took it!
Mostly through the Cal Arts connection LA developed a relationship two photographers, including Peter Karnig (who couldn’t attend the reunion) and Jed Wilcox. They hold up over time.
And that’s the difference looking at LA today. A lot holds up beautifully. Other stories and art and design, fell flat. But, hey, we’ll get it right next week!

LA Type

A six-month dash of typesetting was an education for me as I interned for [Robert] Dothard the summer before college. His association with the printer, Edwin Rudge put him in direct line with Bruce Rogers, who designed many books for Rudge’s father. He thought Rogers was the best book designer of the 20th century, and he held up Rogers’ typeface, Centaur, as the greatest revival of the first Roman typeface (cut by Nicolas Jenson in 1470). It was the ground zero of Dothard’s design style, because it contained the basic code of the Latin alphabet. Its capitals had the proportions of the finest Roman stone inscriptions, like the Trajan Column (118 AD). The lowercase was derived from the 8th-century Carolingian minuscule and the calligraphy of Jenson’s contemporaries in the Italian Renaissance. In the print shop in Guilford, Vermont, Dothard had some loose Centaur type, cast on a Monotype machine. I set the address for the letterhead I made that summer, for a film group that I was involved with in prep school, Nebuchadnezzar Films. The key was to print it in letterpress so that the letterforms spread as they pushed into the paper. (Almost all the type Dothard used was set in letterpress and proofed on clay-coated repro paper.) Phototype and digital versions of Centaur look a little spindly, since no one has tried to add the ink squash that the original was design for.

The capitals were originally produced by American Type Founders for the Metropolitan Museum. ATF followed with the lowercase for Rogers’ Oxford Lectern Bible (1935). I got to read aloud from that bible on Christmas Day 1962 at the Service of Lessons and Carols at Saint Thomas Church. The “lesson” was an excerpt from the Book of Genesis. I had a script, but they opened the big bible for me, and chose to read directly from the 16-point Centaur. It made an impression on me.

So, I was an devout convert to Dothard’s belief that this was the best Roman typeface.

Stanley Morison brought Centaur to the British Monotype company as part of his program of classic revivals. Monotype’s Bembo, Poliphilus, Garamond, Baskerville, and Bell were filled out Dothard’s book work.

But there were more. He loved Bulmer, the 1928 ATF revival of a William Martin design cut by the Baskerville foundry in 1792 for an English book publisher named Bulmer. Dothard used the font for the Deerfield Alumni Journal, which I helped lay out the summer of 1966.

And in his printing shop behind the farmhouse that housed his studio, there was a collection of wood type, brought from the big printing company he had sold in the early 1950s when he became a full-time freelance designer. These were complete fonts in cases labeled with the styles and sizes. They were big and easy to set and proof—compared to the tiny lead type. My favorite was “12-line Broadgauge,” a 144-point slab serif that Dothard explained was a “pointed Tuscan” design. I set the name of the film group in the wood type and sent it off to the stat house in Brattleboro with the Centaur address line—sized to the same width.

I pasted up a mechanical for the letterhead and showed to Dothard, and he was taken aback. “My God! You can’t combine Centaur with a Tuscan!” He suggested a modern, like Bodoni, or an Ionic would go better. But I liked the combination, and let it stand.

Nothing became of the film company, but the eclectic type library from Dothard’s studio has stayed in my mind. There was a lot of energy in the conflict between these styles, and I’ve put it to work ever since.

_ _ _

An eclectic type library

In my first design effort after college, Amerika, a prototype of a magazine for students, I used Aldine Roman for text, a Bembo-like face on the IBM Selectric Composer, a typewriter that had been souped up to set type—“strike-on.” The headlines were a variety of styles from 19th century slab serifs to the classic revivals I had learned at Dothard’s.
The magazines that inspired me in the 1960s (Rolling Stone, the original Monocle) used an eclectic range of display typefaces. Sam Antupit (Esquire) said that he chose a headline type to match the feeling of each story. Other well-designed magazines stuck to a smaller group of fonts, either because the designers (Henry Wolf in the case of Show) liked only a few fonts, or (Walter Bernard, in the case of) they wanted to keep it simple, like a newspaper. This is the rule publications adopted in the 21st century: Use one main font to help push the visual brand. As the media environment became more cluttered, this made a certain amount of sense. A media brand struggles to stand out today.

In 1972 it was simpler, and I was able to use a wide span of type styles. Most were from the 19th century and early 20th—English and American transitionals, moderns, and slab serifs.

Fifty fonts were included in our order for the headline typesetter, the VGC Phototypositor. I picked out the classics that I saw in these magazines, and others that I’d seen in the catalogues of New York typesetting shops, and a wonderful pamphlet from Amsterdam Continental, which sold foundry fonts from European type founders, including Stempel, Berthold, and Stephenson Blake.

My thought was that I wanted an array of typefaces for the headlines of feature stories. Despite my religious feeling about Centaur and the core Latin code, I didn’t see how I could make a Jensonian Old Style fit in, but I included it in the VGC order, thinking I might want to veer off the base and make a layout stand out.

For a story about West magazine, I used Kabel Bold, the font Mike Salisbury used there. For a story about art deco architecture, Futura Modern made a one-time appearance. And for a profile of the great Christopher Isherwood, I had to use . . . Centaur.
There were three groups of styles styles that the art department combined for headlines—and set on the Phototypositor: The slabs, the grots, and the moderns. Designers would set the type for their own pages. Here’s what it looked like.

Modern: Bodoni, Bulmer

I’ll start with the Moderns, the style that represented the first big change in letterform design since Jenson. Right at the beginning of the 19th century fonts with much more contrast between thick and thin strokes, led by the brilliant printers Giambattista Bodoni in Parma and Pierre Didot in Paris. With classical calligraphy, the angle of the weight of the pen was 30° or 45°, which became the stress of the first “old style” printing fonts. As the use of quill pens, where weight was determined by pressure, the angle was in the mind of the person with the pen. With hard surfaced paper, the contrast between thins and thicks could be more extreme. Engravers followed this style, and by the 18th century, printers wanted to follow them.

Bodoni and Didot made the verticals the heaviest lines. Their contemporaries thought of this as neoclassical. It was actually revolutionary. Today we think that the contrast makes Modern type spindly and hard to read. But two hundred years ago, the ink squash in printing made the thins heavier, and the soft paper absorbed some of the ink. The result was less contrast and more legibility. The moderns took over publishing, and most books and all newspapers used them for text and headlines. Publishers are a conservative lot, and when I started reading them in 1960s, newspapers were still using moderns. Two of the best papers used Bodoni for headlines: New York Herald Tribune and Washington Post. For LA, I wanted to ride this tradition, and so Bodoni became the default headline type for news stories and departments.

The precursor to the Moderns are the Transitionals. They had more contrast than the old styles, and the angle of stress was getting more horizontal. I thought I would want to use Bulmer and maybe Baskerville for stories with a little higher tone, and so included them in the order.

Slabs: Egiziano, Ionic, Clarendon, Whiten

The type of LA revolved around the slab serif font, Egiziano from the foundry Nebiolo in Turin. In Italian this means Egyptian, the 19th century type category that we now call slab serif. There are a number of stories explaining how the name came to be attached, including my favorite, that French sailors used big cards with giant slab-serif letters on them to signal other boats during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. But wouldn’t they have used flags? Or lamps? In any case, as type forms began to change in the 19th century, styles were given tags suggesting they looked foreign or strange. San serifs, for example, were called Gothic or Groteque. Another word for Egyptian was Antique. Fonts with chiseled or triangular serifs were called Latin. Those with inverted weighting—thick horizontals and thin verticals—were called Italian. (Not to be confused with Italic.)

Whatever the name, you can imagine how that might have been adapted from the Moderns: Just increase the weight of the thins, while keeping the vertical stress. Et voilà, vous tenez un Égyptien.

I had first seen this type in Chicago in 1970. David Travis, a partner on the Amerika project, saw it on a flyer from the big type shop, Ryder. They had made their own two-inch film font for the Typositor and were setting type at $2 a word. I ordered it at Gulf State Advertising in ’71, and when I was getting my own machine, I asked if them if could make a copy of the font. They did, but said, “Don’t make a habit of this.”

Later, VGC brought out another Egiziano which had higher contrast. I wrote to the company asking, nicely, what is this? They replied saying they had a license from Nebiolo and the font was made from “inkless impressions,” whatever those are. When I looked in the Metro book, I saw that the VGC must be using the 24 point, and what I liked was the 36.

For digital fonts, Monotype digitized the 24 point master from unknown artwork. MyFonts offers a version by Dennis Ortiz Lopez, who work at Rolling Stone after my time, and evidently used their copy of the Ryder font for reference. The real digital heir to Egiziano is David Berlow’s Giza, which comes in 16 weights.
https://store.typenetwork.com/foundry/fontbureau/series/giza

For the LA logo I took an L and an A from this Egiziano, and had PMTs made about ten inches high. I wanted to work big, since I had so little drawing experience, never mind lettering. Working on a light table, I put a sheet of Bristol paper over the stat and made an outline, then shifted the original 45 degrees a couple of inches at a 45 degree angle. Then I sent this artwork off the stat house and ordered a same size neg and a contact print on Velox paper. I pasted that down the Velox on illustration board with two coats of rubber cement, since I wanted it to last, and then filled in the shadow with a sheet of red Zip-A-Tone, which photographs as black. I cut right down the middle of the outlines, and I had the logo.

For years, when people asked me about my favorite typeface, I answered, “Egiziano.” In fact I’ve followed Dothard’s precept that a typeface should be selected for the content, and particularly for the text. At LA, Egiziano was used for the top headline on the front page of No. 1, and then I understood, like caller on the telephone, that it was the brand font. Thereafter, we used it for section and department headings, but not for headlines.

Instead, there was, Egyptienne (which was called Egyptian Bold Condensed in the VGC catalog). I came the Amsterdam type foundry, and was in the Amsterdam Continental book, where I expect Walter Bernard found it for New York magazine. The still use it over and over agai,  is called a Clarendon, which is the word applied to slabs that have bracketed serifs, that is with a little curve on the inside corners.
https://store.typenetwork.com/foundry/djr/fonts/job-clarendon/bold. (See, also, the semi-bold.)

Whiten Black and Whiten Black Condensed, which are now almost forgotten, were among the last new typefaces produced in metal by ATF in 1963. Some say it was based on Antique Bold, a Morris Fuller Benton font from 1803. http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-80266.html

We sometimes mixed Whiten with Stymie Bold, another ATF typeface, and one that is often confused with Rockwell (Monotype), Memphis (Stempel, Linotype) and Karnak (Ludlow)—mid-20th century slab serifs. Whiten is gone, but these fonts are all available from the Monotype retail sites. At Type Network there is another ATF slab, Egyptian Antique, a 1910 design that foretells these mid-century slabs. It was originally released by the Inland Type Foundry and was digitized by Mark Van Bronkhorst.
https://store.typenetwork.com/foundry/atf/fonts/atf-egyptian-antique

Sans: Sans Serifs Condensed, Franklin Gothic

The next step in the rapid evolution of commercial type design in the early 19th century was sans. While Caslon had put out a Sans Serif typeface in 1816 called Caslons Egyptian, the idea caught hold a century later.

While the design world was getting caught up in Helvetica, I kept looking for types that were stronger, even funkier. Condensed Sans Serifs No. 1, an early 19th century design from Stephenson Blake, fit the bill. A itling font (caps only), it found its way into the first issue of LA. VGC had made a film font from 36-point proofs, the heaviest size. It was accompanied by its sister Sans Serifs Shaded, which I loved. 

After 75 years of boom, the city’s infrastructure was beginning to age. There was a lot of concrete, but there were a lot of cracks, and the color was turning yellow. In West LA they tried to keep everything freshly stuccoed and painted, but some buildings sat unchanged since the 40s. Right next to them were sleek new buildings with glass curtain-walls. The random development pattern reduces the pretentious design of the new stuff. The rush of real estate and the absence of city planning gave the city a lumpy streetscape that persists to this day.

The city had a diverse population with many Hispanics, Asians, and Blacks, but on the west side it was mostly white: A lot of young people, my age and younger, with blond hair bleached by the sun. These were the people on TV. I’d always assumed the clean, healthy and tan extras I’d seen in prime-time series were carefully chosen. But no! They all looked like that here. The casting agents could just round them up at the malls and pluck them from lines at movie theaters.

Looking around for an apartment, I realized at my salary I could actually rent a small house—not in Westwood or Beverly Hills perhaps, but just to the east, in West Hollywood. I found a four-square bungalow on Lloyd Place for $200 a month. It had a tiny garage that had been converted to an apartment, and I rented that out to Paul Cheslaw. That left money for food, wine, and a little marijuana. An ounce, a lid of reefer, was started at $15, but it could last a week.

Across Doheny, the next big street, were the flats of Beverly Hills, a sea of boring four-story apartment buildings. So, we didn’t think we were living in a rich neighborhood. If I turned right on Doheny, it would take me up to Sunset Blvd. On the corner was a big liquor store, Gil Turner’s, which delivered! The strip was just to the east, and Sunset Records and the Whisky a Go Go were right there.

Go left on Doheny, and you are quickly at Santa Monica Blvd. There was a Ralph’s supermarket there, where I got my food, and the Troubador, the famous folk club that was getting increasingly hip. I would drop in there if I had the $10 cover.

My social life was in the company of folks from LA—the only people I knew in town. But they had friends, and there were a lot of dinners out, and a certain amount of drinking. Or we would just sit around the house and listen to records and smoke grass. But we talked about LA all the time, and in the office, we listened to records and smoked grass.

Cardoso lived a couple of blocks away with his wife Susan and two big Irish wolfhounds, who were as eccentric Bill. The four of them were crowded in a ground floor apartment in West Hollywood, a couple of blocks from house. The living room faced a small, paved courtyard, with a sliding glass “patio” door. The dogs often wanted to go outside, and houseflies buzzed in when the doors were opened. During one visit, the flies were bothering Bill, and he got up and opened the sliding glass door. Then he went to one corner of the living room and started caterwauling his long arms and wiggling his fingers. He moved slowly toward to the door, gathering the flies in front of him, and shooed all of them back into the courtyard, quickly sliding the door closed.

Cardoso listened to jazz, smoked pot, dabbled in other drugs, and was fond of opium. He still was doing acid, which I thought was a relic of the 60s, and drank plenty of wine. The result was an endless stream of stories about his life in the Portuguese community of Cambridge, Massachusetts, work at the Boston Globe, and his “retirement” to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands where he opened a jazz club called Apple Core. One day in the fall of 1972 I dropped in, and there sitting on the sofa was Hunter S. Thompson, whose epic Las Vegas piece in Rolling Stone made such an impact on me. The two were like brothers, peas in a pod. Talking at full speed, often simultaneously, with impressive erudition and constantly increasing invective—about everything. I thought that this is what it must have been like in the 20s when my mother sat, listening to H. L. Mencken, whose command of the language must have been stimulated by all the cigars and Baltimore beer.

Gonzo. That was the word Cardoso applied to Thompson’s style, and it stuck. He explained that it was Guee (Portuguese immigrant) slang for “gone,” like when a baseball is hit out of the park. It was regular part of his vocabulary.

Whatever he was on, Cardoso turned out great stories for LA, including covers about violent gatecrashers at the Playboy Mansion, unrepentant Manson adherents, and the bizarre escapades of a fading Hollywood star, Terry Moore.

All have a sharp Cardoso insight and prose about the underbelly of American society. My favorite feature was a profile of Monti Rock III, the transplanted New York celebrity hairstylist who had a salon at Saks in the 60s and made frequent appearances on Johnny Carson’s and Merv Griffin’s shows. No one ever knew why he was a celebrity, which increased his appeal. “I’m the first honest phony,” he told Cardoso.

Three years later he released the first of three hit disco albums, Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes Review. But in LA in 1972 he was casting around for something to hang onto and became friends with Cardoso after the article ran. I saw him a few times and went to his apartment in the Beverly Hills flats for a chaotic party with a wide mix of people. I talked mostly to his boyfriend, Lenny Lenstrom [chk]. One time I asked Monti why he became a hair stylist. He smiled and said, “Because when your naked, the only style you have is your haircut.”

LA published only 24 issues. The last was dated December 16. Fleming bet the farm on a big scoop that had come his way, when he was still at Newsweek. He thought he had found D. B. Cooper, the hijacker who the year before bailed out of a Northwest Airlines jet with $200,000 in ransom money and made it the cover story (October 21) with a photo of the man claiming to Cooper on the front. I asked why LA should publish this story, since it had nothing to do with Los Angeles, but Fleming said he had advice he had to publish it or he could be charged with withholding evidence. Fleming had put up $30,000 to get hard evidence, some of actual 20-dollar bills paid to Cooper with the right serial numbers. But after running a second part the next week, the FBI pushed back hard—telling Fleming that his source was an imposter. In a third part (November 4), he did not quite recant the story, but admitted, “I jumped high and fell hard.”

This might not have mattered much to the readers or advertisers, but LA’s backer, Max Palevsky, lost faith in the publication. Palevsky had made his money in tech; the company he started, Scientfic Data Systems, a pioneering manufacturer of minicomputers. His $60,000 investment netted about $100 million when the company was sold to Xerox in 1969. That would make him a billionaire in today’s money.

Palevsky had another investment in publishing, Rolling Stone. His entry in Wikipedia says he rescued the magazine from “financial ruin” in 1970. Wenner says* that the company didn’t need the money and used the investment to establish a valuation for the company. In 1972, Palevsky made a big contribution to the McGovern presidential campaign. Both relationships, the magazine and the candidate, were ended abruptly. So it was with LA.

We printed the December 16 issue, No. 24, with 40 pages and a non-Christmasy cover about Mexican American gangs. The VIP typesetter had arrived and we started to use its output in the issue, planning to go entirely inhouse in the New Year.

But we came to work on Monday, the 18th, and found that there was to be no new year for LA. In a staff meeting Karl said that Max was pulling the plug. We were all given the next two weeks’ pay in lieu of severance.

In a daze, I went into a meeting with the senior managers about winding down the operation. Running the meeting was the new publisher, Herb Yager, who had been an account executive at Carson-Roberts, the biggest ad agency in Los Angeles, and perhaps the most creative. The year before it was acquired by Young & Rubicam and Yager began to look for a new job.

I asked the group, “Can we keep going without Max.” Yager said, “No.” I asked, “Are we paid up on our bills? Do advertisers owe us some money? “

“What, and go out on a limb, without a backer?” Yager said. I said, yes. It worked for Boston After Dark, which was funded entirely by the staff’s ideas and energy. Yager said, “I can’t do that. I have a name to uphold in this city.”

I asked, “By what authority are you making this decision?”

“I’m the publisher,” he said.

“No, you’re not!” I replied. Yager gasped. I said, “You are not publishing anything so you have lost the title. Let’s find a publisher who will keep LA going. If advertising is going so well, we can raise the money and get the printer to give us a break in exchange for some stock.” I was thinking we could skip an issue “for Christmas,” and resume in the new year.

I was voted down.

Fleming no longer had the energy after the D. B. Cooper debacle. And Ramo, the real business manager, had had enough; he had lost his six-month battle to keep Palevsky on board. (Yager went on to partner with Saul Bass, turning his studio into a global visual branding agency with clients like AT&T.)

Looking back at LA 50 years later, it’s a lot better than I remembered—even after acknowledging the fact that it gave me a 700-page portfolio as a publication art director at the age of 24. There are 100 pages I’m still happy to show. ity. Hell, I was experimenting the whole time, but so where the editors.

I realized that’s what made LA great. It’s willingness to experiment, to go a little outside the center. We were taking the usual elements of a publication and turning them around a little. To make this work, we were keeping some of the traditional forms—good reporting, good writing, good photography, and I was trying to convey it with good typography.

It is interesting to see how the design of the paper evolved.

The first “LA Guides” were illustrated mostly with stock art—old engravings, pictures of LA in the 40s, and movie publicity photos, also from the 40s which we thought was the decade that defined LA culture. Later, we added related pictures for the key items. One issue Strick went all over town taking photos for the listings.

I refused to jump copy except from the front page, and got better at making the page dummy a bit more fluid. A story would continue to the next page, even if there was only another column of text. And I resisted “jump lines”, although once I put a little first to show the story continued. Rather than treating each page as a unit, I tried to think in terms of two-page spreads, where one story could take more than a page, and the rest of the space was an unrelated story, set off by different headline type.

Departments in the front-of-the-book had a consistent style throughout the 24 issues: A heading in 24-point Egiziano, with a ornamented rule stretching over the copy. Each week we made new rules, usually making litho film of dingbats that we could set, step-and-repeat, on the PhotoTypositor. Fantastic! One issue we took palm trees from Ed Rucha’s book, A Few Palm Trees. Rucha loved the allées of spindly palms lining the old streets of Los Angeles. I have no recollection if we got permission or paid him anything.

In the back, I began to “snake” the reviews like the items in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” This allowed the editors a little more flexibility in terms of story length, and made the pages look more interesting.

In six months, I learned that we needed captions under the pictures, and that captions were a good way to intrigue readers, or at least to give them some of the content even if they weren’t reading the all the text. It took ten years before I adopted The New York Times law: A caption under every picture.

At the end, with fronts like “Thank You, Jesus,” “Isherwood,” and “Gangs of the Barrio” the issues were getting consistent and strong. Sure, there were weak spots, but given another six months, and it might have been pretty good!

As it was, the art department had knitted into a delightful team. Music played most of the time. We listened to KRLA-FM, one of the first great alternative rock stations with Shadoe Stevens as program director and DJ. McKenzie and Gasnier were fond of the Dr. Demento Show on KMET, another radio genius, who loved to play old novelty singles like, “Pico and Sepulveda.” When that one came on, Jim and Scot would start dancing around the room, brandishing their T-shares like spears. Ingalls and I would join in, sometimes reluctantly joined by Katherine Zogby-Bothum, who worked in the next room designing promos and “pub-set” ads, with good effect and great speed.

Parrish had started testing the VIP typesetter, and some display type appeared in the last issue, set in-house. David Strick had hit his stride. The design, I thought, was getting there. And it was really fun. But then, suddenly, it was over.

Beverly Hills office

In May and June (1972) I brought together a staff, and tried to work out the copy flow with the editors. We thought we all understood what to do, but each had assumptions based on their experiences. Fleming and Sherrill came from publications who had teams of people moving copy, setting type, and making up pages. I came from places where we improvised, and shared the work equally in the hope that we would go to press on time. 
While New York magazine had defined itself as a survival guide to the city, LA was to be more like the Village Voice, the weekly tabloid started in 1955 that defined the “alternative newspaper” genre. There was to be actual writing—on interesting people, the culture of the city,  the popular culture it helps produce. Politics would be analyzed but not covered like a newsmagazine.
We started working seriously on the first issue the beginning of June with increasing fury. One problem was the cover story, a biting piece about a disco, class, and drugs, like features in Vanity Fair ten years later: “The Paradise Ballroom,” by John Fleischman (another starting reporters who went on to a successful career as a writer).  The photos available were dark club shots of people who were not recognizable, at least to me. I wanted to convey the slickness of the LA club scene, and engaged Brian Davis, a young airbrush artist for the cover illustration. The editors thought the result was tawdry. They opted for the paparazzi-style photo Davis worked from. A big caption under the photo of the club owners, started, “The Other Side of Paradise.” Along the top was a banner, set in Egiziano, as I can see now, not obviously connected to the story: “Cosmic Outlaw.” This made a very tabloid-looking front page, reinforced in a left-side contents column by the shirtless image of a big guy with the heading, BLACK JESUS.
After the issue came out, the phones rang off their hooks, and we all jumped to take calls. I answered one, “LA,” and an older female voice said, “Is this Cosmic Outlaws LA?”

_ _ _

The cover illustration ran inside, but it I didn’t blame the editors for rejecting it as a cover. As a fledgling art director, I was clueless on how to achieve the Hollywood sheen of record album art, but I thought we should get into the paper. I assigned several pieces to Davis and Blue (who later teamed up), as well as Blue’s partner Joan Nielsen, who accepted the low fees that were in my budget. But I couldn’t make it work, and I moved on to more familiar territory. Peter Green, a talented caricaturist, did several covers for LA, as well as inside art—not all of them “cartoons.” There was a cover showing the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, West, sinking in the ocean. Its famous art director Mike Salisbury, a master of the slick 70s style, suggested the idea.
For a profile of Francis Ford Coppola by Stephen Farber (who went on to a long career writing about the movies), Green put a charcoal drawing of the director’s head on a still from The Godfather, the scene where the padrino’s ring is being kissed. It worked, maybe better than an airbrushed retouching job.
Green would try anything. I had tried a clip-art free-press engraving on the top of the masthead, and one of the editors suggested we do our own. So, Green did a line drawing in ink of an eagle gripping a banner with a legend in Latin, “Angeli Ama aut Relinque.” Los Angeles, Love It or Leave It.
The greater part of the visual content of LA was the photography. The circle of photographers I met at Cal Arts netted our staff photographer, David Strick, who was willing to shoot anything from a quick head shot, to sports, to a whole photo story. An LA native, he was the grandson of Gale Sondergaard who won the first Oscar for supporting actress. His father, Joseph Strick, directed Ulysses, and his mother was a successful Hollywood publicist. Strick, like many good photographers was quiet and modest, and he hadn’t talked about his Hollywood family until the day I was saw on a contact sheet that he had finished the roll with random shots from home. He lived with his parents, and having just moved out of my parents’ house, I was curious to see what it was like. There was a bookcase filled with books and memorabilia, and there on one shelf was an Oscar. I asked, “Is that an Oscar?!”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “My father got the Academy Award last year for the best short documentary.” As a still photographer, Strick was learning fast, and he had an eye for people. His subjects responded.
Peter Karnig contributed highlights from a big suburban project, shot in what he called the “dirtball town” of Newhall, the original rural outpost in the Antelope Valley before Valencia was developed. (This area, including Valencia, the development were Cal Arts was built, is now incorporated in the city Santa Clarita and sprawls along I-5, up and over eastern side of the valley.) His pictures, with captions by John Kaye, showed an America that few of the folks in West LA knew existed. In the context of LA, that essay foretold a divide in the surging metro area (and in the whole country) between the wealthy elite and the working Americans. The hard light and the detail of each portrait makes these pictures look fresh 50 years later.
Jed Wilcox was another from the group. We gave him some assignments and picked up a number of his personal shots, including my favorite, with his friend Lynn “Napoleon” Lascaro jumping into a wave in Santa Monica.
Several staffers took pictures, including Barry Siegel and Karl Fleming, himself. The best was Terry McDonell, who had worked as a photographer before turning to reporting. For a Christopher Isherwood profile by Anne Taylor Fleming, he got three portraits, plus a cover. Harder edged was a four-page photo essay on the fundamentalist sect of Tony and Susan Alamo, accompanying a feature by Tom Moran. McDonell took the front-page picture of a soulful young man looking straight into the camera, holding a plate with his dinner. “Thank You, Jesus” was the headline. (Later, McDonell’s experience as a photojournalist helped him push the visual side of the magazines he edited.)
Most of my attention at LA was directed at the typography, the laying it all out. Just getting a 32- or 40-page issue set in long columns on shiny photo paper, repro proof, and then pasted up on illustration boards for the printer amounted to a volume of work I wasn’t quite ready for. LA’s Mergenthaler VIP typesetting machine was on back order, and we had to send the type out, which added hours to the turnaround. For the body type, I had to settle for Corona instead of Ionic No. 5.
The first issue was late to the printer, which put stress on our distribution, which was being managed in a rough-and-ready way by Chuck King (aka Charles Kane), largely through “honor boxes,” the coin-operated vending machines placed next to stores. King was not the kind of guy you would argue with.
The editors blamed the art department, but I already knew that most writers have no idea how a newspaper is produced.  Talking to Judy Lewellen, the copy chief, I concluded that copy flow was not going to be managed by, say, the managing editor. We needed to bring in a production manager to police the deadlines. I thought of a persistent job applicant named Michael Parrish, who seems to have an instinctive understanding of newsrooms, and a willingness to take any position right then. A graduate of Reed, wearing the black leather jacket I associated with Reed alumni, Parrish would have a better chance of corralling the editors than I would, as an art person, or than a neutral business-side hire. I asked him if he would start as production manager, and he said, yes. After a No. 1 issue postmortem meeting, I asked Fleming to meet Parrish, and he hired him.
Soon he had copy flowing on schedule, and we could all concentrate on the content. Parrish became an accepted part of the editorial team, and Fleming listened to his ideas for stories. (He later went on to be editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, the “Freep,” which evolved from an underground to something more like LA, an alternative weekly. In San Francisco, he became editor of Coppola’s City newspaper, and then, in 1985, the first editor of the Los Angeles Times magazine, taking the Sunday slot that had been vacant since the scuttling of West magazine.)
While struggling with the art, I leaned hard on the type. There was a quick evolution of the format in an effort to make the layouts more dynamic. I wanted to get people to turn pages. Longer stories started spilling over righthad pages onto the following lefthand page without a “continued” line, which magazines didn’t need.
Column headings were reinvented after ten issues, while departments kept their Egiziano kickers above a custom rule that stretched the width of the column. I snaked items in the columns and tried to interject unrelated pieces onto a page, to break of the linear features. 
I did know from the beginning, from my own habit, that nobody reads everything in a publication. But I had not yet grasped the fact that a reader always looks at pictures first, and then read the captions. Making a rule that there is a caption under every picture gives quick summaries or hints of content, and lends a little satisfaction. A reader could feel that the issue was read even if they skipped many stories. This fact was confirmed decades later by the eye-tracking studies publishers did.
Sherill would write great subheads (chapter titles) to break up text. They’re also called “breaker.” They can give the reader a sense of a story and its momentum. I learned to call him when I needed some clever text. Laying out the firstclassified ads, I asked him for a tagline. “What?” he said. “Like under the headlines in Esquire, something ironic,” I said. He frowned, grabbed a sheet of foolscap (newsprint from the end of a roll at the printer) and quickly typed:

LA Classified
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Saddle up!

I used it, of course.

The first two agate lines of a classified ad were free, and there were was an interesting variety of goods, a few trade offers, and no sex ads.
The big agate session was the “LA Guide,” which ran for six pages, covering arts, clubs, movies, TV, and sports. There were listings for places to get emotional help, to take your kids, adopt pet, attend a class—and a few random interesting events. It was edited the old fashioned way, by rewriting ever entry—by Fleming’s wife, Anne Taylor Fleming, an LA native. (Ms. Fleming went on to publish both non-fiction and fiction books, with a feminist angle. She wrote a column for The New York Times Magazine, and was a regular commentator on CBS Radio, and then the “NPR News Hour.”)

As much fun as I was having in Houston in 1971, working for Adie Marks, the strong and impetuous head of Gulf State Advertising (among clients, the Astrodome, Ringling Bros.), I really couldn’t live on my salary without living at home. And if you’ve ever taken acid at your parents’ house, you know what I mean by needing a raise. Off hours, I had enjoyed working with Nathan Fain on Newspaper. His family owned the daily in Nacogdoches, Texas, and he was thinking about how a weekly could be reinvented in Houston. (Fain was later the first communications director of GMHC, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and was an early victim of AIDS.)
Stephen Mindich had found me somehow and through the agency hired me, to redesign Boston After Dark, including a logo for B. A. D. the free edition. This got me thinking about the concept “alternative weekly”—in contrast to the underground newspapers of the 60s. Mindich wanted to upgrade the look of the paper to compete with the slick Boston Phoenix. Before a year was out, Mindich merged the two papers under the Phoenix name and the design was abandoned. But this commission gave me the idea that there was a new market for publication art directors.

Eleanor retyped the edited copy, got the copy reader to check it, marked it up for the printer, put it in the mail, and kept a log of the copy flow. “If we made the 5:00 mail, the third of the day, my packages would get to Camden by 9:00 the next morning,” she said. Haddon would set the type, and send galley proofs by the end of the day:  Forty-hour turnaround.

Eleanor would count lines of type in each story and calculate the number of pages needed. The editors would decide the page count in the issue and then cut the text to fit. Haddon would do corrections,compose stories in pages, and pull proofs. The editors would make final cuts—and a minimum of corrections, in consideration of the deadline, and the cost.

She talked about the magazine 30 years later, but I don’t remember ever seeing a copy. She said that the magazine was so trendy that college students would carry around a copy so they could be seen with the trademark green cover. Recently I bought a few copies on eBay. And it is magnificent. Well worth reading nearly 100 years later, and still completely entertaining.

It was a big magazine, with as many as 500 editorial pages, 7 x 10 inches, printed on uncoated book stock. There were at least 50 pages of ads. Except for the ads there was no art at all, not even little cuts used as fillers to fit the stories. There were no cartoons, unlike the rival New Yorker. Section headings were set off with elegant bands of Italianate type ornaments. The covers, nearly identical every month for the first decade, had black type and solid dark green backgrounds, with an Arts & Crafts style ornamental frame that was printed in black, blue or dark red which provided little contrast. The only art was an awkward hexagonal “AM” monogram, and the only text was the name of the magazine (which might have been drawn by W.A. Dwiggins), plus a subhead, the names of the editor and the publisher, and the price. Fifty cents (maybe $7.50 today). The cover did even have headlines of the stories inside, although newsstand copies sometimes sported a belly band with story titles and authors’ names.

Inside, all type, except for the ads, and almost solid type in two columns, with no subheads or chapter titles or pull quotes. The stories were fit into pages, usually filling every line. No widows. Few hyphens.

Because of this density, when you pick up a copy today, you look at the ads first, which run in front and back on coated paper. When you see all the book ads, dozens of full pages, you realize that movies were still silent, and radio was in its infancy. Books and magazines were the national media. And everyone was a reader. To emphasize this, there was a “Checklist of New Books, with capsule reviews which ran in the front on left pages opposite the first 20 or so full pages ads.

The Mercury was published by Alfred Knopf, rising house of the 1920s, which published writers like Willa Cather, Carl Van Vechten, D.H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann. Many appeared in the new magazine, including Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, Clarence Darrow, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis, George Schuyler, Edgar Lee Masters, Eugene O’Neill, Carl Sandburg, and William Saroyan. The Mercury was a truly literary magazine in the style of Scribner’s before the World War. After the ads, the magazine started with an essay or short story, profiles, sketches, and then an editorial by Mencken.  His lead sentence from the January 1928 issue: “The sad thing about lawyers is not that so many of them are stupid, but that so many of them are intelligent.”

Mencken held forth in “The Library,” a section of book reviews, which either extolled or slammed their subjects. He never bothered to review any books of medium quality. George Jean Nathan, the mighty theater critic of the New York World, did theater reviews, but had his own section called “Clinical Notes.”

The most popular department was “Americana,” a snarky anthology of excerpts from publications, listed by state.

The design is so simple that I never wondered who was the designer, assuming it was done by the printer, as many publications were. Checking that assumption, I learned that the elegant typography was the work of Elmer Adler,¹ who later published a legendary type quarterly, The Colophon, and who started the graphic design program at Princeton. Adler worked from a suite of splendid offices, The Pynson Press, in the same giant 43rd Street Annex of The New York Times,² where Eleanor had worked before going to the Mercury. Adler had become good friends with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who became publisher of the paper in 1935 after the death of his father-in-law, Adolph Ochs. Adler in turn advised the newspaper on its type.

To today’s eyes, the text looks big, with too little space between the lines. But the typesetting is very good, with even word spacing and a reasonable number of hyphens. The numerals all old style, and there is almost no use of Italic. It ought to be good. (Mencken, who was a newspaper veteran, generally followed AP style which included no Italics, since text was sent by wire.)

It was all set in Garamont, the Garamond revival designed by Frederic Goudy for Lanston Monotype Company of Philadelphia, released in 1922. Knopf was known for its typography, and often described the fonts in colophons. (Adler is given the credit for making the colophons a standard feature of Knopf books.³

The opening of the feature section of the Mercury, December 1927, with an astonishing piece by George Schuyler, a frequent contributor whose sharp wit earned him the nickname, “the Black Mencken.”









A detail from the next story (the last right-hand page above) shows the Goudy’s Garamont. There was good ink spread with the printing, and not a little wobble in the alignment of the characters, which may be an artifact of the stereotype plates.

The editing was done on the typed manuscripts, and it was always a struggle to hold down the number corrections and cuts were made on the galleys, which caused additional charges for “author’s alterations.” Mencken, who was the editor of the Baltimore Evening Sun when he was 19 years old, ran a tight ship. He was not, however, able to order around George Jean Nathan. Co-editors together at Smart Set, a stylish rival of the original Vanity Fair, the two started as co-editors, but Mencken quickly took over. Nathan, whose girlfriend in those days was Lillian Gish, had a mind of his own, and a famous temper. (The George Sanders character in All About Eve, who takes on the young Marilyn Monroe, is based on Nathan.⁴

One afternoon, after a long boozy lunch, Nathan returned to the office to find a big stack of advertising stereotypes on his desk. Eleanor, who had the next desk, had been getting ready to crate them up to send to Haddon, part of her job, and had run out of space. “Mr. Nathan did not always come back from lunch,” she explained. Nathan, enraged, swept the molds off the desk, on to the floor, banging them up enough to make them unusable.

Eleanor got a second desk.

Mencken had the only private office. More restrained and even more brilliant than Nathan, he came to New York three days a week from the house he grew up in, on Baltimore’s Union Square. He spent the days in his Mercury office meeting with writers, editing relentlessly, and rewriting everything. Mencken was the precursor of Hunter Thompson and Warren Hinckle style of journalism. The Mercury became the best selling magazine at the Columbia and Harvard bookstores.⁵ The magazine often read as though he wrote it all, witty, sardonic, written in a pungent American English, and he was the expert.⁶

He arrived from Baltimore always carrying a heavy valise, Eleanor noted. She assumed that it was filled with books and manuscripts. But one day he called her into the office, and she saw the briefcase, open, sitting on a chair. As she walked by, she glanced inside. It was filled with bottles of beer. Bootleg beer from Baltimore.

Perhaps the reason Eleanor did not talk much about Mencken is that he peaked in the 20s, a voice of the boom. Despite an eclectic (today we would say “diverse”) roster of writers, and a wide range of political theories in the magazine, he seemed unable to adapt to the drastic changes in society after the crash, and circulation dropped. In 1933 he left the magazine, succeeded by his assistant, Charles Angoff, Eleanor and Joe’s Friend, and Mencken’s assistant for several years.

Mencken’s influence declined. He hated Roosevelt. A part of the German-American culture of Baltimore, and a victim of anti-German sentiment during World War I (which he had vehemently opposed), he could not believe that the Germans were falling under the influence Hitler, and as Europe moved again toward war, he pushed against America’s entry. In the 30s and 40s he continued writing a column in the Baltimore Sun, and published a number of books, including collections of his delightful memoirs much of which had appeared in the New Yorker. He issued A New Dictionary of Quotations, and two supplements to The American Language.

But his role as a king pin of American culture was over. Like Hunter Thompson, his caustic cynicism and his contempt for idiocy in his fellows, came to surface, perhaps soaked in the beer in had once celebrated. In 1948 he had a stroke, and never wrote again.

Three decades after his death (in 1956) a diary was published, and since then his memory has been linked to a number of his sour comments that are racist or anti-Semetic. William Manchester, a biographer of Mencken who had worked for him at the Baltimore Sun, wrote a letter to the Times pointing out how many of the writers in the Mercury were Jews, and the fact that both Knopf and Nathan were Jewish. Like so much history, context is important.⁷ But Charlie Angoff, also Jewish, and the writer of another biography of his first boss, has stated, “He was a violent anti-Semite.”⁸

Mencken was a gentleman from a long line of Leipziger Geschäftsleute, and would never say anything intentionally to harm anyone. Like his father, August, a cigarmaker, he was a social conservative who would not do anything that counterproductive to his own success. Nearly a century later, actions speak louder than words. Mencken’s associate were Jews, and he published the work of great writers, whatever their religion, from Louis Untermeyer to Emma Goldman.

His view of African Americans may have been paternalistic, but looking through the dozen magazines I have, there was a story about race in every issue. Articles delved into the economy, health, and relations between black and whites.

George H. Schuyler, an important black writer, wrote a hilarious piece in the 48th issue, December 1927, titled “Our White Folks.”

The Aframerican, being more tolerant than the Caucasian, is ready to admit that all white people are not the same, and it is not unusual to read or hear a warning from a Negro orator or editor against condemning all crackers as prejudiced asses, although agreeing that such a description fits the majority of them. The Ethiop is given to pointing out individual pinks who are exceptionally honorable, tolerant and unprejudiced. In this respect, I venture to say, he rises several notches higher than the generality of ofays, to whom, even in this day and time, all coons look alike.

We hear today about systemic racism in American culture, and of course it was much worse 90 years ago. But if the media had continued to offer the kind of content that was a regular part of the American Mercury, there might be real understanding between white and black people today. Mencken, like almost all whites in the 1920s said (and wrote in his diary) things that are completely unacceptable today. But as an editor he assigned diverse points of view from writers of every religion and race, and presented them with great craft, humor, and power. For me, these editorial actions speak louder than the words in his private diary.


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1. IMDB: A movie character based on George Jean Nathan.
2. William Manchester’s review of the Mencken diary in the Times.
3. Mencken’s , The American Language, first published by Knopf in 1919 (with a W.A. Dwiggins cover). Now available in digital form from Project Gutenberg.
4. The chapter about the Mercury is scanned in the Google Books version of this important history: Frank L. Mott, History of the American Magazine, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA: 1958
5. A “Talk piece” about Elmer Adler in The New Yorker, September 19, 1959, “Talk of the Town” page 31. Available online by subscriptions.
6. Photographs of Elmer Adler’s studio in the New York Times Annex building on West 43rd Street, in the Princeton archive. https://www.princeton.edu/~graphicarts/2009/02/adlers_pynson_printers_photogr.html
7. Typographer Paul Shaw discusses colophons in Alfred Knopf books.
8. Charles Angoff on Mencken’s anti-Semitism