Unpacking Boxes, then Discovering Riches

By now, attentive readers know that we've relocated the publishing and editorial offices of Graphic Arts Monthly (see page 20), and although we moved perhaps just half a mile, to the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan, everything had to go into boxes and packing cartons.

This entailed purging as much extraneous matter as possible (why doesn't anyone ever move to "larger quarters"?), then packing up the materials we wished to keep, arranging and marking those contents to ensure some semblance of order when unpacking.

Yes, it's a bothersome exercise but it does present an opportunity to examine and evaluate the contents of drawers, files, and bookcases, and to renew our sense of responsibility, heritage, and purpose.

And what findings. In most cases, we pack rats—facing a destination with less storage space—end up saving the really old stuff and the pretty new stuff, but discarding much of the in-between stuff.

For this reason, I kept a lot of folders, memorabilia, interesting correspondence, files, keepsakes, and monographs that I had inherited from predecessor editors. And of course, back issues, issues in one form or another—in bound annual volumes, as loose but complete collections, and odd copies—that date all the way back to 1929, when GAM was founded as a digest-size magazine, and to 1971, when I started with the magazine. Two highlight issues: GAM's 50th anniversary issue (September 1979) and The Century of Print (bound with GAM's December 1999 issue).

One box contains 49 issues of the magazine from the 1950s, each still in its original mailing envelope with the addressee's name—"Tourek Engraving Co., 1449-51 S. Thirteenth St., Omaha, Nebraska 8"—embossed with Addressograph plates. The set was sent to us as a courtesy by Frank J.G. Tourek in 1988, no doubt when he was purging files.

The accumulation also involves a lot of miscellaneous "stuff": several brass Linotype mats, microfiche films of 1977 issues, the magazine title in carved wooden type, a litho stone, editorial indexes of GAM (for many years, the year's index was published in the December issue), a newspaper pressman's hat with folding instructions, photos of staff members, staff organization charts, copies of speeches, and so on.

GAM archival materials are varied: lists of contributing editors (the names include Gene Bulinski, Bill Bureau, Bill Byers, Art Colton, George Griffin, E.B. Harding, Frank Higgason, Morris Hochberg, Bob Kling, Al Materazzi, Carl Palmer, and Gerald Silver), a photocopy of page 37 of the June 1969 digest-size issue announcing a coming change to a full 8 1/4x11 1/4" format, correspondence of Paul J. Hartsuch, who served as GAM's editor from 1965 until 1975, and so on.

Another category is old vendors' materials, such as pamphlets, histories, correspondence, and photographs. It's not surprising that Mergenthaler Linotype Company pops up a lot. One 40-page booklet, titled "The Big Scheme of Simple Operation—A Primer on Linotype Mechanism and Operation" and copyrighted in 1940, refers in its frontispiece to the company's "fine, big buildings, general offices and works located in Brooklyn, at Ryerson Street, Park Avenue, Hall Street and Flushing Avenue."

There are monographs aplenty: The Craftsman's Emblem (describing the familiar 1457 imprint by Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer) and Marks of Craftsmanship (another directory of printer's marks used in the 1400s and 1500s, this one marked #1870 of a total of 2,250 copies produced), The Story of John Peter Zenger, Typographer's Digest (No. 27, Spring 1969, on Frederic W. Goudy), and The Kemble Occasional (San Francisco, September 1972 issue).

All in all, the exercise of moving, while difficult and time-consuming, is refreshing in its own way in that, in requiring us to prioritize what we keep, it emphasizes the keepsakes that will probably be important to our successors.