The Long Transition: 1993-1996

For at least the first three years of the 90s, Barbara Quinn Schmidt hinted with increasing urgency that she would like to pass the editorship of VPR on to someone new. She had wrought significant changes in VPR, but the publication of the journal continued to be an ad hoc venture carried on by Barbara, several supporters at SIU-Edwardsville, and students in selected classes. In those pre-desktop publishing days, setting up the publication, printing, binding, bundling, and mailing demanded a serious commitment of time from the staff she had assembled, and, as she confided to me, the fun was beginning to wear off. The crisis came for RSVP at the 1992 meeting at Manchester Polytechnic University; with no other volunteers, and faced with the reality that VPR would cease as an important critical journal without an editor, I stepped up as interim until Penny Kanner's search committee could unearth someone who could do the job justice.

Barbara assured me that editing VPR would be a piece of cake, especially since I had access to key technical expertise through the faculty and resources of my community college. When I reminded her that I had no editing experience whatsoever and no Victorianists on campus to turn to for support, she pooh-poohed my concerns, saying something to the effect that anyone who could edit an institutional accreditation self-study (!) could put out four issues of VPR a year. She also told me that she had the next several issues nearly completed, and that I'd have some lead time to get started on my first issue, 26:3 (Fall 1993). Within a few weeks boxes of files, paper stock, back issues, correspondence, bills, and ledgers arrived. The spring 1993 issue carried the following notice that I had asked Barbara to insert:

VPR is Moving!

After 8½ years at Southern Illinois University under the editorship of Barbara Quinn Schmidt, VPR will move to Vancouver, Washington in June; former RSVP President Richard Fulton will take over editorial duties for at least the next two years. Fulton will be assisted by Shirley Sackman in Vancouver. John Powell will be Book Review Editor, and Louis James and Merrill Distad will continue to act as Associate Editors for Great Britain and Canada respectively. . . .

On behalf of the Society and Victorian scholars everywhere, the new editors thank Barbara Schmidt and her staff at SIUE for the heroic efforts in publishing four quality issues of VPR annually beginning 1985. It is rapidly becoming apparent to the new staff just how much is involved in getting out an issue. We hope that the members of the society will bear with us as we establish a working routine. We will be prepared to discuss future directions for VPR at the annual meeting in Ann Arbor. Please be there with helpful comments. Thanks for your confidence.

As that plaintive second sentence in the second paragraph indicates, I had neither the staffing nor the time to publish the paper at Clark College. When I took the job the Board agreed that we needed an established publisher to handle subscription lists and the mechanical details of printing, binding, and mailing. John Powell contacted several presses; we finally settled on the University Press of Colorado, which at that time was engaged in an ambitious expansion program. UPC would publish and distribute our first effort, the fall 1993 issue. I sent off a mockup of that issue on a WordPerfect disk in late June.

Readers familiar with VPR's early days will remember that for over twenty years the 8½ × 11 format that had been a holdover from the mimeographed newsletter era continued as the journal became a more serious critical organ. UPC were not excited about continuing the larger format, preferring instead a more standard 6 × 9 journal size. However, they agreed to print their first two issues—e.g., numbers 3 and 4 of volume 26—in the larger format to maintain continuity and to avoid alienating an army of librarians (fig. 1). In August I sent a disk for number 4, and began plugging away at what I hoped...