Editor's Letter

I have a Rachel Kushner on top of the pile. It’s a book that my friend Annie suggested back in January. We were sitting in Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University, joyriding through some of the best magazine stories in the country, including one by Ms. Kushner. On the flight home, I bought the book online from Changing Hands. It came a few days later. Landed on the pile. And hasn’t moved since.

Neither have books by Cormac McCarthy, Florence Williams, Andrew Krivak, Wallace Stegner and Lesley-Ann Jones.

Like the Octomom stockpiling groceries in the hours before a storm, I buy books as if I have nothing else to do. Books and books and books. I have every intention of reading every single one. But I don’t. For someone who dabbles in words and makes magazines for a living, that can be embarrassing.

“So, what are you reading, Bobby?” the book junkies around me always ask.

“Well … ummm … I’m about seven pages into Graydon Carter’s new memoir, but we’re on deadline with the issue … and I’m writing a book about the history of the magazine, which takes up my nights and weekends … so, well … I don’t have a lot of time for independent reading.”

It’s embarrassing, but it used to be worse, before I knew there was a word for my affliction. It’s called “tsundoku,” which combines a couple of Japanese phrases: tsunde-oku (letting things pile up) and dokusho (reading books). According to Andrew Gerstle, an emeritus professor of Japanese studies at the University of London, the word originated in 1879 as a jab at teachers who owned a lot of books but never read them. Today, the term is more descriptive than sarcastic. And it’s different than bibliomania, which is a passionate enthusiasm for collecting books, but not necessarily reading them.

I have some of that, too. Like Rebecca Romney’s pursuit of Jane Austen, I’ve spent the past few years trying to get my hands on every book we’ve ever published. You’d think I could just walk into a storeroom at the office and find everything, but we don’t have a storeroom. Just a couple of shelves, and they’re mostly empty — we’ve done a lousy job of canning our own vegetables. So, I’ve been on a quest, with my own dough, and I’ve had some success. My latest acquisition, Volume III of our Color Album series, features 286 photographs from our 12 issues in 1959. Each one is reproduced in “Micro-Color Lithography,” a process patented by the W.A. Krueger Co., our former printer in Milwaukee.

The series made its debut in 1957. “Here is a treasured gift,” our promo began, “a library keepsake, a true collectors item for anyone who appreciates things beautiful and artistic. The Color Album for 1957 contains all of the 244 full-color reproductions — on premium enamel stock — that appeared in the magazine during the past year.” The paperback sold for $5 and the hardbound was $7.50. I’m not sure which version Harold C. Zamarr bought, but he seemed to like it.

“I became a subscriber to your splendid magazine in January,” the New Yorker wrote, “and was so delighted with the first issues that I immediately sent for your Color Album. I have never seen such fine color reproductions — and so many of them — produced in one book. It is a contribution to American graphic arts. You have solved my Christmas shopping problem if you plan a similar album for 1958.”

His Christmas wish came true. We did it again in 1958. And for four more years after that. Then, in 1966, we published a more discriminating collection titled A Treasury of Arizona’s Fairest Color. The intro copy reads: “Herein are presented nearly one hundred color photographs of some of the most dazzling and dramatic scenes that Arizona Highways has had the pleasure of offering readers during the past twenty years.”
 

The letters poured in, including one from Folsom Moore of Bisbee.

“Many times in the years I have lived in Arizona have I seen a sunset and a thunderstorm and a placid summer vista in a drowsy shimmering valley,” he wrote. “And I have seen a wintry landscape from a mountain highway. And I have seen the breathtaking majesty of the Grand Canyon and the awe-inspiring red rocks around Sedona and the shimmering blue of the valleys seen from Chiricahua National Monument. It has often occurred to me that someone should combine the many glorious vistas of Arizona in a book. You have done that in your Treasury.”

The book, which we described as “a book of beauty, beautifully bound,” features 96 of our best images from 1946 to 1966. Six decades later, to celebrate our centennial, we have a new book of greatest hits. It’s another beauty, but putting it together wasn’t pretty. Like folding a fitted sheet, the process was a complicated ordeal, because there’s never an objective best. After enough deliberation, though, the superlatives rose to the top, even for those of us who aren’t seasoned photographers.

Despite my front-row seat at Arizona Highways, my understanding of f-stops and focal length is limited, like the acreage of a cornflake. But to paraphrase Potter Stewart, I know a great photograph when I see one, and our centennial collection is packed with the best we’ve ever published. Until we come out with another version. Meantime, I’ll keep this one on a bookshelf in my home library, next to A Treasury of Arizona’s Fairest Color, our Color Album series and at least a hundred other Highways books I’ve bought on eBay. If only we had a storeroom at our world headquarters.