A junior staff member of National Review records some of our shames and glories during an exciting first year…
Flushed with self-importance, we call attention to the fact that this is our First Anniversary issue and confess that we want to talk about it, or better, about ourselves, always an enjoyable way to pass the time, national review received its first lesson in the gentle art of mixing work with pleasure when, late on a Friday afternoon just one year ago, two wooden crates were delivered, simultaneously, to our offices. (Our offices, by the way, which consist of a large room surrounded. by cubicles, were described a while back by a labor union paper that went on to prove beyond peradventure that we are a tool of the NAM, as “palatial,” no less.) As we pried the slats from the smaller of the two boxes, dispatched by the Wilson H. Lee Company of Orange, Connecticut, we saw for the first time the blue and white cover which (may we say it?) we have come to love. It is a cover described by Harper’s magazine as “exhibiting the classic stigmata of extremist journals,” but once described by one of our readers, bless him, as a “blue-bordered haven in the desert of slanted news.” The second crate which, we are glad to say, was larger, held twelve bottles of champagne—the very first act of thoughtfulness from one of our subscribers, a thoughtfulness on which we have come to rely. By the time we had completed the work that lay before us, involving the orderly disposition of both crates, well, the weeks ahead looked less ominous.
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