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• Angela Serratore

  Post Secrets

  Tags:

  communication,

  letters,

  New York,

  rules and regulations,

  women

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  “The post-office system offers a facility for clandestine correspondence which no respectable father or mother on the European side of the Atlantic would think of without a shudder, if it were proposed to give our young women a similar privilege.” —Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1867

  Communication of and by women has always struck fear into the hearts of men (see: novels; epistolary), but until the middle of the nineteenth century it was largely manageable—husbands and fathers, even servants, monitored a lady’s letters, and the wild fluctuations in cost of mail kept all but the wealthiest of girls and women from taking pen to paper on a regular basis. That changed with the standardization of postal prices in 1845. The cost of mailing a letter was reduced to three cents, making the mail accessible to working women, middle-class housewives, and schoolgirls with pocket money. Suddenly, wide swaths of women had access to two dangerous things—the mail and the post office. Anthony Trollope’s 1852 invention of the pillar-box had given British girls a chance to subvert the authority of their scandalized parents by mailing letters in secret, but their New York counterparts who visited the post office could both send and receive mail almost entirely unmonitored by those who might want to regulate their epistolary lives.

  Continue reading » April 18, 2012
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• Moira Donovan

  Back Matter

  Tags:

  books,

  employment,

  history,

  libraries,

  the media,

  work

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  Imagine a world without organized information. The possibility conjures to mind a Borgesian vision of books stacked in unmanageable piles, a dusty tidal wave of knowledge threatening to engulf the unwary. And yet, prior to the mechanization of printing in the fifteenth century, no such system existed. The 700,000 unwieldy twelve-foot scrolls housed in the ancient library at Alexandria did not allow for internal organization beyond the inclusion of slips of paper denoting the title and author. Nor did medieval scriptoria, prodigiously productive in the creation of manuscripts though they could be, require or afford any uniform method of sorting through the laboriously copied information. In such circumstances, page numbers and even contents were liable to change based on the individual producing the text.

  It wasn’t until books were mass produced, a process already underway by the time Johannes Gutenberg introduced his printing press in 1458, that the requirement for a formal record achieved nearly ubiquitous status. Suddenly, the range of human experience, from Plato to property transfers, could be distributed quickly and cheaply. With the rise of the book, the back-of-book index—which first appeared in a 1467 version of St. Augustine’s On the Art of Preaching—became crucial in the ordering of human understanding. And thus the indexer—organizing ideas, choosing themes, restringing plots—was born. The possibility of generating identical copies of the same work, and the explosion of works being produced, meant that the index, along with the table of contents and title page, was necessary for the scholar laboring under an increasingly heavy weight of material.

  Continue reading » April 13, 2012
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• Gregory Shaya

  The Myth of the Fourth Estate

  Tags:

  jobs,

  journalism,

  newspapers,

  the future,

  work

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  In The Front Page, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 send-up of the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago journalism, the ace reporter Hildy Johnson is ready to throw in the towel. “Journalists! Peeking through keyholes! Running after fire engines like a lot of coach dogs! Waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them what they think of Mussolini. Stealing pictures off old ladies of their daughters that get raped in Oak Park. A lot of lousy, daffy buttinskis, swelling around with holes in their pants, borrowing nickels from office boys! And for what? So a million hired girls and motormen’s wives’ll know what’s going on.”

  Johnson longs for a more respectable job and a steadier income. But he’ll see the light—when the next big story comes in through the window, in the guise of the death-row escapee who pleads his innocence—and devote himself once again to the pursuit of truth. But his question would linger. And for what? What is the purpose of the press?

  Frank Capra provided a telling response in The Power of the Press, a silent film from the very same year. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as shiny as a new dime, plays the eager cub reporter at the Times. He’s stuck in a corner of the newsroom, stuck on obituaries and the weather report, and longs for his chance at the big time. Ambitious as he is naïve, he lands his break when he catches the daughter of a local politician sneaking away from the home of the murdered District Attorney.

  Stop the presses! A screaming headline will be drawn up and our bright-eyed reporter will be the hero of the newsroom. But glory is fleeting. Before long he discovers the ill effects of his scoop and comes to see that he got the story completely wrong. Our hero will get an education in life and letters in the last reels of the film. The intrepid reporter defends the young maiden’s honor, catches the real killer, battles the corrupt politics of the metropolis, and finds love along the way.

  Continue reading » April 3, 2012
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