Archive for August, 2007
August 29th
Karen came across an article in the Wall Street Journal recently about a revival of interest in upscale, personalized stationary. “In an age when you can email President Bush and instant-message your boss, here’s one way to make an impression when writing to someone: Pick up a pen and apply it to actual stationery,” the author, Abigail Pesta, advises. “Think of the ‘from the desk of’ stuff that Katharine Hepburn might have used.”
Funny she should mention it, we both thought with a smile: as it happens, Katharine Hepburn wrote her letters on stationary from Quo Vadis’ sister company, G. Lalo…
August 28th
Every year we get inquiries from people wondering why we include Australian and New Zealand holidays in our Quo Vadis planners along with Canadian & U.S. holidays and observances. No one has ever been hostile, just slightly bewildered as to why we selected ANZAC and Waitangi Day to be included.
Well, the reason is the date books for Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. are all in the same printing run at our plant in Hamburg, NY. In order to keep the printing costs down–and thereby the costs to our customers– we needed to employ some economies of scale in production.
Printing for the agendas distributed in Europe and Japan are printed at Quo Vadis’ main plant at Carquefou near Nantes, France.
August 27th
As laptops get smaller and lighter, it’s becoming more and more common to take them along to business meetings. Note-taking is a cinch, and it’s also a whole lot easier to access documents and look up information.
Not surprisingly, however (see: cell phones and public spaces), people are still struggling to come up with etiquette guidelines that are as sophisticated as the technology. Yesterday’s New York Times had a great article on the subject by Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer division. In some meetings, as Hachamovitch points out, “it just seems more respectful to leave the laptops closed.” On the other hand, he says, “if the meeting is covering a variety of areas and the conversation is moving into something I’m not involved in, I don’t feel too bad about catching up on my e-mail.” The Microsoft website lists seven rules for using laptops during meetings, advising businesspeople to “make sure there’s a point” and “use some discretion.
Personally, I tend to err on the side of caution and, well, politeness—if I were giving a presentation, I’d want to know that people were paying attention! But my profession isn’t one that, like some, forces me to attend a lot of meetings. What are your experiences? Let us know in the comments.
August 24th
A better use of your time will aid productivity and peace of mind.
Three tips:
1. Know when you work best. Most people are more productive at certain times of the day than others. Tackle challenging tasks during those hours.
2. Don’t constantly check your blackberry or email. Ignore calls and emails when you are working on projects. If you get distracted all the time it’s hard to get anything accomplished. (This is the tough one for me!)
3. Set deadlines so work doesn’t stack up and overwhelm. Give yourself a time limit to complete a task or assignment. It’s better to have a good–even adequate–job in on time than the most superlative job arrive too late to have an impact on the issue at hand.
August 23rd
About a month ago here in Westport, the Trustees of Reservations reopened the historic Town Farm, where, in exchange for labor, needy residents were given food and shelter. From 1824 to 1956, the 40-acre farm was home to everyone from the sick and the elderly to vagrants and abandoned children.
The Town Farm was recently restored for community use, and there’s now a quiet 1-mile trail that winds around the barn and through the fields. It offers a lovely view of Westport River and would also, had the weather been a bit nicer when I visited, have made a great picnic spot. Alas there’s a cold front all along the East Coast, and I’ll be going back to New York tomorrow…
August 22nd
This half of August has been wet and rainy in the NY area. Like most people, I suppose, I use signs in nature to predict the weather or the seasonal changes. Is the wind blowing the undersides of the leaves up? (storm on the way). Are the flies biting? (rain). Are the wooly worms woollier? (cold winter).
When I was growing up there was always a copy of the Old Farmers Almanac around. It had a bright yellow cover so it was easy to spot. It was started in 1792 and published every year. We would read it to know the best times for planting and the major weather forecasts. Every year we’d look to see how their predictions turned out against what happened. The Almanac collected folk wisdom on gardening, astronomy, weather, and health.
There’s a second Almanac in circulation. Just a pup (published in 1818), it also seems chock-full of references to listening to the land and home-made cures.
It’s probably nostalgia, but I’m going to get a copy for 2008.
August 21st
I’m back in Westport, Massachusetts this week, hoping to get in some more rustic adventure before the end of the summer. In that spirit—and with some nostalgia for the days I used to spend at summer camp in Wisconsin as a kid—I give you my latest favorite New Yorker cartoon, Bruce McCall’s “Camper Bug Alert.” Lions and tigers and… Red Eyed Hyena Spiders, oh my!
August 20th
I spend every minute away from the office at my house on the Nork Fork. The North Fork is located on the far east end of Long Island. Beginning in spring through Thanksgiving the North Fork is dotted with farm stands offering local produce. We make a point to buy most of our vegetables, fruit, eggs, seafood and poultry locally. I was able to very proudly tell my son everything on the table last Thanksgiving came from the area. All the herbs we used for cooking were from our garden.
The Slow Food movement is one of the inspirations behind the appreciation and enjoyment of locally grown food. The magazine Edible East End brings it home for us on the North Fork or the Hamptons.
Food does taste better slow. Slow as in grown at its own pace; and eaten slowly, to taste it, savor it, and really appreciate it– and the connection it brings with the land and the people who grew it.
August 17th
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how Clairefontaine paper is made. Another Quo Vadis sister company, G. Lalo, takes a different approach, using a process that’s much closer to the hand-made method I—and doubtless many others—used as a kid during summer camp.
That technique, in which simple wood-framed screens are dipped into big vats of “pulp” (we used torn up scraps of old magazines mixed with a little bit of water) and then let to dry in the sun, produces a coarser, thicker paper; the only real difference between it and the G. Lalo process is that the latter uses special machines to spray the pulp onto the screens in a much more uniform fashion. But you can still see the faint lines once the paper has dried. The thickness of G. Lalo paper makes it ideal for cards and social stationary—in fact, Katharine Hepburn used blue “Lettre Royale” for her correspondence.
August 17th
The Clairefontaine mill has been in production since 1858, but the location as a paper mill goes much farther back–another 250 years to the early 16th c. Paper has been produced from this location for nearly 500 years. The Vosges region has always had abundant resources for paper-making–clear, flowing water, vast forests and skilled craftsmen.
Around the time of the start of the first mill, a print shop a few kilometers away in the nearby town of St. Die was also established. This site was to become famous as the place where “America” was named.
Vautrin Lud, Canon of St. Die and chaplain and secretary of Renee II, Duke of Lorraine, set up a printing place in St. Die in which two Alsatian geographers, Martin Waldseemuller and Mathias Ringmann began to produce an edition of a Latin translation of Ptolemy’s “Geography.”
Renee II received the abridged account, written in French, of the four voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. Lud had this translated into Latin. The printing of the translation was completed at St. Die on April 24, 1507. The preface was written by Waldseemuller and entitled “Cosmographiae introductio.” In the preface he proposed the name “America,” the feminine of Amerigo. ““We do not see why anyone would be opposed to giving this new part of the World the name of the person who discovered it: Americus. So it would be called America, or Land of Americ.”
By the time Waldseemuller’s error was corrected (discovery should have been attributed to Christopher Columbus) the designation of “America” had spread. In 1538 the noted mapmaker Mercator chose to use America to name both the northern and southern continents. Change after that was too late.
Because of the decisions of Waldseemuller, Mercator and a few others, over 300 million of us now call ourselves “Americans.”
The story goes that the paper the print shop used came from the mill where Clairefontaine now stands.
