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Rummaging through the attic the other day, I came across boxes of The Atlantic and The New Republic from a generation ago.
What first struck me was how beautiful the magazines were. Lavish layouts on expensive 60-pound paper, lots of original art.
Nearly every page in color, at a time when color printing was costly. (The Gray Lady yet to morph into the Multicolored Lady.) Most issues of The Atlantic assigned a full page to a clever illustration by the French artist Guy Billout. Here is an example that doesn’t come across on the Web. Imagine a full page in perfect bright colors on heavy stock.
These issues were written, edited and printed under the assumption that arrival of an intellectual magazine in one’s mailbox was an important event. Even corporations felt the same, The Atlantic, especially, thick with full-page and “double truck” advertising.
This, before Google made off with the business. We think of Google as a good search engine and a comically bad AI -- never forget, Google’s money-making innovation was a new way to sell advertising.
Holding any one of these issues lent feelings of substance and reflection, so unlike the feelings lent by today’s digitized superficiality. I don’t intend that as a good-old-days argument: it is simply a factual statement.
Holding my back pages, I recalled something the great editor Bill Whitworth, 1937-2024, told me years ago.
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