If you are looking for an island of reason in a sea of sentimentality, pass on, reader, pass on. For we yield to no man in our sappiness about this magazine and the achievement it represents. Once every 25 years, like clockwork, we depart our customary standards of analytical rigor and proceed shaky-kneed and blubbering to celebrate this implausible publishing triumph.
Our first encounter with the editor of this journal occurred almost 17 years ago. A mutual friend, the Publisher of these pages as it happened, contrived to bring us together for dinner. (To bone up on the host, we consulted the standard biographies, all of which began with the anecdote of the young American, aged 6, writing to the King of England with the non-negotiable demand that Britain pay off its war debts forthwith. The biographers professed to see in this incident some of the cheekiness, some of the rectitude and the sense of accountability that were later to epitomize the editor’s public persona. Those of us closer to the magazine, however, came to see the boy’s letter in its true historical perspective … as the beginning of the Fund Appeal.)
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