Memories

No Mystery

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

We are speaking of the summer of 1976, when I was a seven-year-old hidden from myself, a summer I remember for being the Bicentennial, for being sunny every single day, and for the work of Leslie McFarlane, who around that time had published a book revealing he was the author of my favorite books. That book landed with a thud that did not reverberate into my world: as far as I was concerned, “Franklin W. Dixon” and not Leslie McFarlane was my favorite writer, and The Hardy Boys were the older brothers I did not have.

Books 1 through 22 of The Hardy Boys series were written between 1927 and 1947 by a Canadian writer who was desperate for income, Leslie McFarlane, and even though Grosset & Dunlap only paid him $85 per book with no royalties, he discovered that this was $85 per book that he could count on as long as he kept typing. He wrote the first eight in just over two years, just as the Great Depression was consuming all it could.
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Statistics

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. Now you know.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested regularly. This is because if the advertisers had been told the 2000-per-week number, they might have asked the newspaper to pay them for the honor of placing their ads; thus, they were given a number 10 times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in an effort at a specificity that would grant legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”
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Don’t Dream It

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one dream, a dream encountered once each month or so (last niht!), a password to an email service or the passcode to the office desktop itself can not be remembered. His hands don’t work. Did they ever? Or interruptions prevent him from typing it in within a fifteen-second countdown, and the entire screen is taken up with 1-5, 1-4, 1-3 … .

He has been away from the office for so long—a decade—and he sees the voice mail light flashing on his phone, but he can not remember the four-digit access code. How many messages? he wonders.
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