May 31, 2013

Finest Hour 116, Autumn 2002

Page 41

BY RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

People sometimes ask us, though no one really knows the answer: what does it take to put an issue together? So just once I kept notes. This might be of passing interest. It was to me. I don’t think our publisher will like it. But she knows.

For months prior to the start of work, FH 115 has germinated, some articles for years. How many hours that involved I have no idea. A lot. Three weeks before handover to the printer, the makings are on hand, but disorganized. The “departments” always come in on time from our faithful contributors. Articles have been evaluated, discussed with authors, revised accordingly, and filed for the likely issue: 115, 116, on through 120. There is always 50 percent more than any issue can hold. The raw material glares at us.

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DAYS 1-4

Gather ye chickens. We assemble the contents of the issue, constructing a page by page “road map” as a rough guide, shuffling things that won’t fit into next issue’s file. Much has come in by e-mail, tossed into raw computer files, awaiting attention. Every word has to be edited and turned into uniform type. Garamond is the current favorite, set 11 point for features and 10 1/2 point for departments (after long experimentation, the ideal compromise between space-saving and eye-saving). My own material has been periodically revised for weeks after the first draft, some of it sent out to for others to critique.

As usual, we have a mixed bag. Some people are born writers, serving exactly the right word count, beautifully written. An editor’s duty is to make everyone look good. “A bore is someone who tells everything,” my best editor once told me. We have only one criterion: “It must be Churchill-related.” If it is, and if it’s fresh, we make it work.

The editing of the departments —Datelines, Around and About, Action This Day, Trivia, Question Time, Riddles Mysteries Enigmas, Inside the Journals, most of the letters—allowing for interruptions—takes four days.

DAYS 5-7

Now for the material that arrived in hard copy, which Barbara has been scanning into WordPerfect (I hate MS Word; it keeps interfering with dumb suggestions, like your old nanny) and doing a preliminary edit. A has sent a charming story from India, about a Gandhi disciple who hated Churchill but is coming round after As dogged ministrations. As home tongue is Hindi. His English is good but he’s sent 2000 words. There’s room for 500. Edit it down: three hours. I’m not sending him a proof because he will come back with more copy, bless him. Oh well…sent it to him anyway.

We are interrupted by B, who is unhappy that we passed up his piece but published one by C, whom he dislikes. We patiently write that what he sent we’d already covered. He is not mollified. Two hours wasted.

A tough nut: D has written a Churchill book in Finnish. E has found a Finn who translates the Finnish review—3000 words! FH cannot really devote more than 750 to a book however good that is not in English. We spend the better part of a night after supper cutting it down, and e-mail it to E to have a look. E comes back with deft improvements.

F has sent us a great piece about Churchill’s American mentor, Bourke Cockran. F is over 80 but writes like 40, takes little editing. His piece is 3500 words, but he sent only two photos. This is a worry: FH is too “grey,” in my opinion—not enough photos. Inevitable with all the scholarly material, but we want to entertain, too. The editing is easy, we find only 500 superfluous words. Layout will be tricky with two illustrations.

At our request, G in Florida contacted the owner of a Palm Beach estate once owned by Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, frequented by Churchill. Barbara has scanned his report, sent last December. Now, in her scanned text, tossed aside when received, I find that last December G 1) located the owner; 2) invited us to visit him on our way to Eleuthera (ulp); and 3) has seen the owner’s great photo, sent from the Duke of Marlborough, showing WSC and Clemmie at this place. But his photo is stuck to the glass of its frame, so can we get another? I didn’t realize we had a photo. Too good to run without it, so file the article for FH 116 while e-mailing H to ring up Blenheim and try to pry loose a copy of the photograph (see page 25).

Last August, J sent us a newspaper article about Patrick Kinna, last surviving member of Churchill’s wartime secretariat: a lovely man with good memories. We are determined to get it in. Barbara scans the newspaper article, which J has obtained permission to reprint: they’re in newspaper style, one sentence paragraphs. We put it into decent prose and pace. It raises points that need checking in the library. Takes three hours, right at dinner time. The publisher-cook is furious.

DAYS 8-10

It is the 4th of July, like a blast furnace outside so I spend the day indoors with FH and Quark Express (desktop publishing program). If I get this to the printer by the 8th we can sail on the 9th but have to be in DC on the 10th for a CC meeting. The ready file is now full of edited manuscripts. All we need do is turn this heap into an issue.

Open Quark and bung in the cover photo: a Hailstone painting sent by a London dealer who wants to sell it. We get one-time rights for the publicity—a thing we do to keep color coming. Finding good color is constant worry. This portrait is not great (later I will be bawled out for it). It was scanned with a Macintosh, so it should be all right. Reminder: give the printer the original CD and pray it is not a “jpg,” because jpgs are Internet scans and can lose definition when translated into print files. It’s a print file, thank God. Drop the titles out white so they pop, reduce so they don’t overpower. Page 1 done—only 47 to go!

The inside front cover is no problem; all the updates were entered as they came in. But two new CC Associates change the column lengths and some tweaking is needed to make them fit. Bypass the contents page: we always do that last.

Page 4 is the letters column and as usual spills way over. I used to continue letters on a back page but noticed that journals I respect rigidly stick to a page. Tight editing reduces ours to one spillover column, leaving two-thirds of page 5 for the start of “Datelines,” requiring the same layout as FH 113. We import the layout from the back files and away we go on Datelines.

Finding photos is a painful business. Two early Datelines mention Churchill’s demand for beer for the forces; and his bodyguard, Walter H. Thompson. We hit the “morgue,” a file of pix torn out of books, glossies bought or bartered over the years, but still not computer-indexed. (I keep promising myself, but….) A good shot of Thompson falls out in two minutes —but we want the one of Churchill with the dock workers, asking, “are you getting enough to eat [and drink] ?” We can’t find it, not even in photo books. We are sure it’s in one! I give up after a half hour. (We found it weeks later and just for the record, it is shown on page 30 of this issue!)

What to do about Ruth Ive? She is the wartime secretary who had the job of cutting off Churchill if he strayed into classified material on his transatlantic phone calls. History Today and The Times have run lengthy accounts of her stories, so we excerpt their account, quoting the most amusing episodes. Later we find Ruth Ive is speaking to us at the Virginia Churchill Conference. She was a good catch!

A’s piece is a problem, since it involves his pro-Gandhi friend, but there is no photo of A and his pal. Instead there is a great photo of A shaking hands with the headmaster of his old school after a lecture. We use it, sure the casual reader will think it’s his friend. Well, readers should read.

Incredibly, “Riddles, Mysteries, Enigmas” fits into one page after a big riddle is cut and postponed to FH 116. An equally good two-page fit is K’s fine “Action This Day” column, after we reluctantly trim a nice reflection by Churchill on a one-time Irish revolutionary who sacrificed his ardor for a peaceful Ireland. We run it at pages 14/15 but later move it to 26/27 so that something else runs on the natural spread (24-25, center of the book). Ready for the lead article. There are two contenders: Bourke Cockran and what we suddenly realize are three articles with one theme—interpreting WSC to young people. Tough choice.

Cockran is finely written, really our best this issue, so we go with Bourke.

Because of the lack of photos, we start big, a full-bleed Cockran photo on the first page, the titles dropped out white. This leaves only one other photo, so the rest of the piece will go all grey unless we lighten it up with blurbs—quotes from the text set in large italics.

Two hours later: worked. An amusing blurb with the second photo kept pages 18-19 from looking grey. Note to the printer: “shoot this in line because the background is dark as a cave.” Cockran spills over by half a column onto page 21, so we tweak and edit the story to end clean on 20. This leaves a righthand page for “Wit and Wisdom” —a humor break from the heavy history. Another two hours go by.

Of the three “youth” articles, only L’s was actually written for young people. It’s the longest, so it leads. But the other two are natural fits with a few changes to the lead paragraphs, and the triptych fills two spreads. How to illustrate these words of philosophy? We hit upon Churchill in subaltern’s dress uniform (haven’t used it for 25 issues), placed in an oval to render it fresh, and a caption: “He stepped up—what about you?” Uncle Sam Wants You…

On the second spread there are no photos at all, until we come up with a piece of artwork used before. We silhouette it so the type flows around it, then hit the wrong button and lose all our work! (Half an hour.) We bring it back in a box and it comes in cropped tight around the face. It looks pretty different that way, so we use it as-is! We think we are very clever.

The second article is three lines too long; we tweak it to fit, but have to blow up the third piece by three lines to take up the slack. Works. Half-way through, five days to deadline.

DAYS 11-13

The next piece is full of illustrations, though the “pictures” are samples of facsimile thank-yous Churchill’s staff would send to well-wishers on his birthday or other occasions. M has found nine variations. Easy layout, nice after two grey spreads. The graphics are stark, black-on-white so we run them on a light grey background. Putting this on the center-spread means the background flows across the spread and the printer won’t get upset trying to match anything across the gutter. This is my article, but I keep a firewall between FH and the rare book and autograph business, so I use a pen name.

Which reminds me of the rule I learned from my best editor: nobody gets more than one byline per issue. Book review bylines don’t count (everybody must sign their opinions). But if you have two feature articles, you must choose a pen name for one of them.

Our third “serious feature” is a thoughtful piece on Churchill and war crimes, a heavy story to follow the autograph stuff. It falls neatly into two spreads. Merrill Lynch sent a nice Churchill ad whose theme fits.

“Books, Arts and Curiosities” is our “back of the book” section where we shovel in book and film reviews, Churchilliana, people, stamps and coins, recipes and trivia, article abstracts, bibliography.

N’s review is 2 1/2 pages; we have 1 1/2. Condensing takes two hours. Other reviewers are briefer: they all fit into five pages, leaving a space on the last page where we slot a “Moment in Time” photo from the filler file.

Interrupted by A, who emails: “In answer to your question, it is perfectly all right to refer to Chaudhary Daulat Ramji Saran as ‘Mr. Saran.’ The suffix ‘ji’ is like the English ‘Esq.’ after a name as a form of respect. ‘Chaudhary’ means ‘leader,’ like ‘Fuehrer’ in Germany…well, perhaps ‘Don’ in Italy could be equivalent. But again not of the same nature (violence).” Where else could you learn this?

At this point we usually start counting. We still have the Kinna story and eight departments. Should we go to 52 pages? (Everything must be multiples of four.) But there’s a cash-flow problem at the moment and even though FH is running under budget, four pages costs $600 extra. Try to shoehorn it into 48.

The Kinna piece gobbles two pages, but we get the idea to call him an “Eminent Churchillian,” like the two CC members we are covering, which saves a separate title and lets us cram all three into three pages.

DAYS 14-15

Eight departments left, seven pages plus the back cover to go. “Inside the Journals” (abstracts of articles), “Woods Corner” (announcements of forthcoming new books) and O’s “Question Time” each take a page by tradition. Barbara’s “Recipes from No. Ten” usually takes half a page but this time needs a whole one—ouch.

Page 45 is a catch-all for what didn’t fit anywhere else: our quarterly appeal for more Churchill Center Associates; the 1951 Churchill campaign pin sold by our Washington affiliate; and a series of commemorative covers which ICS (UK) wants us to promote on their behalf. So much for 45.

Two pages plus back cover left—arrgh. Page 46 holds both “Leading Churchill Myths” and “Ampersand,” for we selected the shortest available myth (“Alexander Fleming saved WSC’s life twice”) and the shortest “Ampersand” (pound-dollar values and buying, power since 1874). The latter takes up only three column inches but requires three hours’ research on the Internet. That leaves 47 for “Churchilltrivia,” where it usually goes, and always takes up a page—after laborious editing.

Home free: instead of “Immortal Words” on the back cover we opt for a great photo of Roosevelt and Churchill at Quebec (it was the cover of FH 35, but nobody will remember, and it’s a splendid photo of the two magnificoes.

People ask why Barbara is listed as publisher and what publishers do. In my house they cover for the editor: handle bills and accounting, register issues for copyright protection, scan material sent in hard copy, proofread, ship complimentary copies, deal with UPS and the post office. No white shirt publishers here.

This is not the end, and not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning. Ahead lie hours of proofreading, and half a day packing up the UK and Canada shipments and mailing out the Australian and complimentary copies.

Monday noon: we enter a multitude of corrections from preliminary proofing and rush to the printer with the artwork, a print-out, and a Zip disk containing the computer files. The printer promises final proofs in a week. That gives us a reprieve to do something else for seven days—we duly go to Lake Winnipesaukee on Tuesday, but there’s no wind!

POSTSCRIPT

While trying to “do something else,” Finest Hour continues to intrude. (A day never goes by when it doesn’t.) A long call Thursday from P, who wants to interview an outspoken, pro-Churchill professor (a tentative yes); a letter from Q, who wants to write a documentary examining Sir Winston’s will (no thanks); a promoter with a widget he wants to sell for $125 and will give the Center $5 for every one he sells (such a deal, when he knocks them off wholesale for $40.) Our “no-commercialism” rule saves us again. Also, the photo of Churchill painting in Florida has arrived…

H kindly had Blenheim send us a copy of the photo of Churchill at his easel, wearing a bathrobe of many colors with Clementine intently observing over his shoulder. Now that it’s here we spend all morning narrowing down the date, which we fix at 1946. The photo shows the painting well enough to identify it as #126 in David Coombs’s 1967 catalogue—but Coombs has it at Balsan’s house in France in the 1930s! So we lay out the article in a new file for FH 116, ship a copy to G in Florida to check; e-mail the photo and text to David Coombs and Minnie Churchill, who are working on a new edition of the paintings catalogue; and to R at the Churchill Archives Centre. We ask all to confirm the 1946 date and the facts as we state them.

I look at my watch and it’s 12:30. Another day half shot…but such fun!