Looking back nearly 50 years later, it looks crude. The color was good, but the resolution, low. Black-and-white pictures often seemed dark and blurry (a result, I discovered, of bad “color conversions” in the paper’s darkroom). The type, by today’s standards was sloppy. There was a lot of Futura bold condensed, which I thought was out of character for the Times.

My boss, Lou Silverstein, the great art director who transformed the paper in 1970s, had distilled the “headline schedule,” emphasizing Bookman, maintaining the use of Cheltenham Bold Italic, and even retaining the quirky Latin Extra Condensed for the one-column news heads, starting the lede story on the front page. To this mix he added Franklin Gothic, which he had been using as the Time promotion art director (a title he still had in 1982).

“Why don’t the use these fonts in the magazine?” I had wondered as an outsider. Inside, the answer was, “To distinguish the magazine from the newspaper.” This was a bad idea. With the print word becoming increasingly cluttered, the identity of the Times should be reinforced by its magazine. And, stuffed as it was with ads from the Seventh Avenue fashion brands, the editorial section needed to hold onto the voice of the newspaper.

Right away, I started experimenting. In the summer of 1982, the magazine editor, Ed Klein, put a story by Louise Bernikow on the cover: Alone: Yearning for Companionship in America.” How do you illustrate this without making it depressing. The photo desk brought in an evocative set of documentary pictures, but none that would make a good cover.

I had come across Max Ginsburg, who today is nearly 90 years old and still painting, and I thought, what about a realistic painting on the cover? I had seen his amazing paintings which recalled the Ash Can style of New York realism and got Max to come in. “I am thinking ‘solitude,’ not ‘loneliness.’” Max said, “I get it.” He came back with a sketch of beach scene, with a distant single figure. A wonderful painting, and I could see the single-word title floating in the sky.

When the cover appeared, a lot of people maid remarks like, “Gee, I hope I can find a beach that empty this summer.” Perhaps it was too positive a spin on the idea, but I loved that way it signaled a new direction for the magazine, reinforcing its New York-ness, and tying the

And the single-word headline was set in Cheltenham Bold on the Autologic machines in the composing room, then blown up in the engraving department, and cleaned up by hand. You can see the over-tight kerning, which was the style at the time. We could touch body type in the magazine by some kind of union dispensation. I say we; I couldn’t, as a manager. But union members could, The pages were actually pasted up right in art department on the 8th floor.

The subhead must have been set outside, perhaps at IGI, my recent home base. I tried to set the decks in Cheltenham bold, but they looked squat, and so I stayed with Bookman, the deck style I inherited. Only later did I realized had been condensed horribly.

With the single photos on a page surrounded by text, I thought that the story looked like the Times. Of course, today the award-winning design of the magazine is much richer, slicker, sharper than anything we could do 50 years ago. But it does not look like the Times.

And that integration was something I wanted to do, even though I still liked the idea of choosing a font that matched each feature story—something Rolling Stone had been doing for a while before I got there. Since the 60s, many art directors thought that feature magazines should be typographically eclectic. Sam Antupit, for the great issues of Esquire used a variety of classic foundry typefaces for featureheadlines. And the subheads were always the same 14-point Italic.

Most of Lou’s designers at the Times were a little jealous that the magazine could be eclectic, typographically. And they thought the magazine should be a relief from the news sections. I remember Lou asking what I thought the magazine represented, and I said it was a bonus for the reader getting through the rest of the giant Sunday paper. And he said, “No, no, no. You can’t say ‘bonus’—that means more. You have to make the magazine a kind of digestive—so that the rest of experience is easier and more fun.”

I thought this could be done within the big library that he had developed. I was happy to use the Karnak, Bob Middleton’s slab that I had always thought was the best 20th century Egyptian. And I put Franklin to use immediately. Chelt and Bookman were more trouble, since the families were small. And I was indifferent to the text type, Intertype’s Imperial, which I figured was invisible to the reader.

The display fonts were all based on the Ludlow versions. Lou had carefully gotten Autologic to digitize these for the fast new APS 5 typesetters. They did not use outline fonts, but bitmaps, which scaled down well enough. But not up. Fortunately, Ladislas Mandel directed the work, and the fonts had several size masters so they looked pretty good. Mandel, who had worked with Adrian Frutiger at Deberny & Peignot and later at Lumitype, the first successful phototypesetter in the West, had become a consultant, and supervised the design of Autologic’s library, including adaptations of existing fonts for customers. And the Times was an important one.

There was only one weight of Bookman at the Times, and just the Roman and Bold for Cheltenham. I liked the Bookman best. I thought Chelt looked liturgical, kind of Presbyterian. Later I learned that it was actually more Episcopalian, since it was designed by Bertram Goodhue, the architect, who had designed type for the famous Episcopal Altar Book. Cheltenham was commissioned by the Cheltenham Press in New York in 1890s, and was released by both ATF and Mergenthaler Linotype in 1903. Morris Fuller Benton added weights and widths, and special effects. The first big type family was created. Today, type foundries find that big families sell better, and Cheltenham became one of the most popular American typefaces, through the 1920s.