Cleaned out the issue and set up a permanent dummy on a floppy. Shelly paid a visit to Nellie this week and her hair is now a lovely, luminous auburn.

Collating tomorrow.

Nellie was the hairdresser Shelly and I shared, a wizard at coloring my hair whitish blue, Shelly’s golden-red.

“Cleaning out the issue” had, just a year or two before, involved pulling cut paper off of large paste-up boards, then wiping them down with alcohol to remove the wax. In 1988, I believe it involved just clearing out the Pagemaker file. DTP was so new to us that there might very well have been no “dummy” yet, no blank template of the issue saved onto the computer. It might not have even been an option. The Pagemaker file might have been too large and buggy to save something like that onto that 80s era computer in the middle office, or at least, not without causing it to crash while using other programs like Wordstar or Dbase.

A “floppy” was exactly that. Not the hard little squares popularized by Macs, but a large, black, bendable square of soft plastic. I believe we still have some of those in a closet here, Michael’s old backup files. He was still using them into the late ’90s.