Historical

This is how the highest level of copyediting can be an invisible art, a Zen in the Art of Editing in which all traces of the thoroughgoing work that has been done are erased in the very doing of that work. To such a response from such a writer, I quickly learned to smile and say only, "Well, great. I'm glad you like it." I've always been a self-taught copyeditor, but it was at Stereophile that I was most and longest encouraged to continue teaching myself how to do the job even better. Most of the writers with whose writing I succeeded never knew. The writers whom I've failed know all too well.

A Word About Larry
A word, too, about Larry Archibald. As a businessman, Larry drives a very hard bargain. I can't imagine ever getting the best of him—he knows when to walk away from a deal. But as a boss, he is firmly in your corner. I mostly remember his generosity. We had so many staff parties: for every birthday, a cake and a celebration; for anniversaries of employment, a party at Larry's large house on the East Side, with serious gifts. On my fifth anniversary at the magazine, he gave me my first laptop computer. Its price was 10% of my annual gross salary, and it weighed 20 pounds. (Well, it was 1992.)

Staff lunches and dinners at Santa Fe's better restaurants—Pranzo, El Nido, The Garfield Grill—were frequent and liquid, loud and late. We closed many of those establishments, and emptied the quieter ones. There were staff picnics and dinners and parties at Larry's place, he in his apron grilling slabs of salmon and long spring onions, served always with excellent wine and beer.

When my ancient VW threw a rod and I had to have its engine rebuilt, Larry—a big man who prefers big cars—lent me an early-1970s Lincoln Continental, one of the dozen or so oversize American behemoths always stashed behind his house, their paint fast fading in the relentless sun of 7000 feet. This was during Santa Fe's monsoon season (yes, there is such a season in the High Desert), and at the time I lived at the end of three miles of dirt road. For three weeks, I piloted that fishtailing barge through six miles of mud each day. When my Beetle was finished and I took Larry's Lincoln in to be washed, every surface but the windshield was caked in red mud two inches thick. It had to go through the drive-through twice.

Larry was a paternalistic employer in the best, most old-fashioned sense. He provided health and dental insurance, and a defined-benefit pension plan in an era when most other companies had already abandoned them as too costly. One year, virtually every penny of the magazine's profits were paid into that plan. He paid for staffers to attend conferences and workshops to improve their skills—not common for such a small company. And when I left the magazine's employ in 1996, Larry gave me, as a going-away gift, the reference system of audio gear—CD player, preamp, amp, and speakers—I'd borrowed from manufacturers and had been using the last few years. (He first paid all of those manufacturers their industry-accommodation prices.) I still use that pair of Vandersteen 2Ce speakers, and they still sound wonderful. Larry and I never talked about it, but I always got the impression that he wanted to treat his employees better than any of his own employers had ever treated him. We were lucky to have him. Thank you, Larry.

As I wrote the long asides just concluded, five more years passed, during which Larry and John sold Stereophile to the first of four or five large publishing concerns, and the magazine moved again (see elk, above), and then again, this time from Santa Fe to New York City, on Manhattan's 5th Avenue (above). Farewell, again.

Another 10 years and several million more words passed, and in 2011, my wife and I, at last worn out and exhausted by northern New Mexico—for all its harsh beauty, the place can break your heart, and it did ours—moved to Ashland, Oregon. Again, farewell. And still I copyedited Stereophile. I have ended up working longer for the magazine than anyone has, ever—a year longer than even John Atkinson.

The Reader Is the Boss
Now these last farewells, not only to Stereophile and to music criticism but, on all our behalfs, to John Atkinson, with whom I have now happily worked for 33 years. He has always been, in most ways, an ideal boss: respectful, appreciative, understanding, and patient. This is how he treats everyone. From the start, he has been an example to me of responsible editorial and business practice, and of how to be a kind, decent human being. I know no one who works harder.

John has also taught me much about how to be a good journalist and editor. "The reader is the boss, Richard," he told me more than once. In practice, this meant that John always tried as hard as he could—and inspired me to work as hard as I could—to serve that reader by providing accurate information and a coherent thought process in clean, clear prose that was as elegant and informative as it was easy to read—if those are not two ways of saying the same thing. Better than anyone, he taught me that everything—a clause, a sentence, a paragraph, a review of a loudspeaker or the latest Beatles reissue—has an end, a beginning, and a middle, if not in that order. He taught me that, for any article I edited, I had to be that article's dumbest and its smartest reader, its least and its most informed reader, so that the end result would neither condescend nor be incomprehensible to the former, nor insult the intelligence of the latter. No, most readers won't notice or care about an absence of dangling modifiers, or the presence or absence of the serial comma, or a careful deployment of close punctuation—but why offend those who will? Truly excellent writing will please both types of reader. It wasn't an easy thing to do. It never is.

John taught me another lesson: "If you have to shout, you've lost the discussion." This was applicable not only to the magazine's staff meetings, whose frequency and length grew along with the magazine, but more important, to the tone of the prose we printed. There is almost never a need for the italics or exclamation points of emphasis: If the words themselves don't say what you mean with the necessary cogency or potency, then the problem is in the words, not whatever typographical glad rags they're dressed up in.

Nor does it serve anyone to insult the readers, or the writers or staffs of other publications with whom you disagree, or who have already insulted you. And John never said so in so many words, but in working with him all these years I saw that he embodied, in every word he wrote in every issue of Stereophile, this simple precept: Never pass up an opportunity to be generous. John Atkinson has more honesty and integrity than anyone else I have ever worked with. I saw those qualities in him, and in his writing and his magazine, every working day for nine years, and since then in every communication we've had, and in every one of the hundreds of articles of his I've edited.

He taught me, too, the truth of George Bernard Shaw's remark: that Great Britain and the United States are two great nations divided by a common language. As his assistant editor, I had to learn to speak British English, or at least to understand it. One morning early in our days together, John said something along the lines of: "Er, Richard, when you've a free moment, I wonder if you might—at your convenience, of course—prepare those cover letters for the preprints of the equipment reports to send off to the manufacturers . . . ?" I took him at his word, promising myself to get to it promptly, in a day or three. Later, that afternoon, John entered my office, looking tired and emotional. "Richard, um, those cover letters I asked you to prepare? Have you . . . done them . . . ?"

Little did I know, at the time, what inner turmoil and torture such directness of address—a direct request, at that—had cost him. Nonetheless, in that moment, I attained enlightenment. I suddenly understood that when British bosses make a request in locutions such as those in which John had first made his, what they are actually saying is: "Do this yesterday or start looking for a new job." To quote P.G. Wodehouse, another master of British understatement, indirection, and redirection: "Oh. Ah."

My wife, Susannah, whom I met 12 years after taking the job at Stereophile and married a year after that, is a member of England's upper middle class. We have been married now for 18 years, and my instruction in British English continues. There is much to learn, including deft deployment of classical rhetoric's litotes: an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary, a device not undear to the heart of our own Art Dudley. Nor is it entirely irrelevant that, through an infinite regression of in-laws acquired through her with a simple "I do," I now find myself not all that distantly related to Wodehouse himself. Oh. Ah.

John Atkinson has always been a firm believer in a lively, contentiously vibrant Letters department, full of disagreement, accusation, informing, correcting, debunking, and what's now called trolling—and, every once in a while, praise and appreciation for what he and his writers do. John once told me that the only reason to publish articles in a magazine is to generate letters to the editor, and Stereophile's Letters sections have long been some of the best I've read in a lifetime of working for and reading magazines. Two decades ago, when issues of the newly large-format magazine not infrequently topped 340 pages, the Letters to the Editor often accounted for eight to ten of those pages. Some of the best and most valued exchanges were of letter writers agreeing or disagreeing with or expanding on what other letter writers had written, in ongoing volleys of broadsides spanning many months. "We just provide the weapons," John said, or something like it, "and let the readers fight it out among themselves." He loved that.

To say that Stereophile—and my working relationship with John Atkinson, which is nearly the same thing—have been important things in my life are understatements of risible proportions. I have great respect for how hard and with what integrity John works, and I have always deeply valued and appreciated his similar feelings about my own work and work ethic. We share a deep respect for quality, in each other and in many other places, and that has been a sustaining thing for me over the decades. I hope it has sustained him, too. From the beginning, he and Larry Archibald trusted me in ways I might never have trusted myself.

Thank You
Twenty-three years after leaving the magazine the first time, as I sit here in my office in my home on a quiet street of small, quiet Ashland, Oregon, surrounded by reference books on language and music, and shelf after shelf of back issues of Stereophile, I feel grateful to have been able to continue doing that job for every one of those issues and years.

For all of that, John: Thank you.

Thank you, too, to everyone else who's ever worked for Stereophile—especially Robert Baird, my successor as music editor beginning in 1996, and who then, for 22 years, endured the odd and awkward indignities of having his beloved music section copyedited by his predecessor. It can't have been easy. We made it work.

And thank you to Stereophile's writers, who have had to put up with my meddling with their prose all that time and more, and for whom I close with a joke that for years has made the rounds of the publishing business. I hope its unknown creator will forgive me for retelling it here without attribution:

An airliner crashed somewhere in a desert, and of all aboard only two passengers survived: a writer and an editor. Uninjured but in shock, without food or water, they set off in search of rescue. They wandered the desert all that day and the next, but found no sign of civilization. On the third day, now badly sunburnt and dying of thirst, able only to crawl, they happened on a spring and a tiny pool of cool, fresh water no bigger than a bathroom sink.

The editor crawled a bit ahead. When at last he reached the spring, he struggled to his knees, unzipped his fly, and began to urinate into the little pool.

The writer, horrified, cried out in anguish and bewilderment: "What are you doing?"

The editor looked back over his shoulder at him and smiled. "I'm making it better."

I know that many writers feel that the editor in this story is all too representative of our ilk. I hope that most of you have found me an exception. If you haven't, you have only myself to blame. Thank you all for your patience and forbearance these 34 years.

Farewell. And Hello.