How the Journal Began: Behind the Scenes with Paul Barchilon and Sandy Grabowski

Paul Barchilon:

Jacques Barchilon, my father, was the creator and editor of Merveilles & Contes, the journal that went on to become the publication in your hands: Marvels & Tales. He passed away in June of 2018, at the ripe old age of 95, after an extraordinary life. This issue of the journal is paying homage to him, and I thought it might be fun to tell the behind-the-scenes story of how the journal came to be.

I worked at what was then Kinko's (now FedEx Office) for fifteen years, starting in 1986. When I first started, there were no computers in the store, and photocopying was the poor man's brother of offset printing—which used steel plates and was incredibly expensive. Our Kinko's in Boulder worked closely with the University of Colorado, and professors and students alike came in daily to make photocopies of everything from handwritten notes and typed papers to books they had checked out from the library.

This world of photocopying was about to be radically altered by the development of the desktop computer and the laser printer, which were introduced to our store a year or so after I started working there. On campus, my father had been struggling to deal with an IBM DOS (Disk Operating System) computer, which had no graphic interface at all and operated solely on typed commands. It printed only text, made up of dots, on paper with holes in the side. My dad hated that computer, and he fought with it daily. He was never particularly good with technology, but he always tried and usually persevered. I remember him constantly calling for service, and, when the technician came, he would invariably tell him it was the DOS. My father often wryly remarked, "They always tell you about the DOS, but they never tell you about the don'ts."

When Macintosh computers came out, he leapt at the chance to use a system that made any kind of sense at all. As the laser printer began to revolutionize the industry, my father started to realize that it might be possible to make a scholarly journal at a fraction of the cost that would have been required with offset printing. Photocopying and binding a document would have been too expensive also, but fortunately he had a son at Kinko's. My dad was a fixture at our store; everybody knew him on a first-name basis and thought he was an adorable absent-minded professor. My boss also really liked my dad and gave me permission to give him a discounted rate on copies—less than half of the normal price. The only catch was that I personally had to do all the work so that no other employees would be working on a project at cost. Dad managed to get a grant from the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a tiny subsidy for publication. It wasn't quite enough to cover costs, but I suspect that Dad made up the shortfall.

Sandy Grabowski (then Sandy Adler):

In early 1986, I moved from my job in personnel to the place where I would be fortunate enough to spend the next eighteen years of my life: a little basement office in the McKenna building at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which had once been a women's dormitory. My official title then was Senior Word Processing Operator, which over the years I managed to have renamed to Foreign Language Communications Support Specialist—a title I made up. My job was to do word processing (how quaint that sounds now!) for the language departments.

The position had been created for the sole purpose of publishing just one journal in the Department of East Asian Languages in Chinese on the then-revolutionary Xerox Star System, a massive two-terminal, two-server complex with a laser printer that took up two rooms, one with A/C to keep the printer and servers cool, at the far end of a dead-end hallway...