There was a night in my sophomore year at Beloit College when my neighbor and Round Table (Beloit College’s 150 years plus old campus newspaper) editorial staff member R. A. Schwartz asked me if I would like to be the publication’s new layout editor. I didn’t take him too seriously at first, but I said I would be.
The first issue where I implemented my new "lotta squares and lines" layout to the cover, which is still used to this day
Following that were so many sleepless nights, bike rides scouring for submissions, ridiculous space-filling writing sessions, and dozens upon dozens of absurd computer malfunctions.
My original capacity as editor was just as layout editor, the guy who arranged things in an aesthetically pleasing and logical way on the page. Within a month I was doing the lit/art editor’s job for him anyhow, so I adopted that responsibility as well. My duties ranged from placing text and images on the page to conjuring graphics for stories to writing silly little bits to fill space to designing and creating the cover page. While the cover was my favorite thing to work on, it was usually the last thing that was worked on, making my Thursday nights fade into my Friday mornings more often than not.
I did a little doodle of Middle College at Beloit for this cover. Inaccurate and adorable.
The actual printing process of the paper itself is a strange and highly impractical fusion of modern technique and Hearst-era BS. The whole paper is first assembled in the Round Table office high is Pearsons Hall. When each page is completed, it is printed out on 17×11 inch copy paper. The collated stack of pages is then driven early in the morning to the offices of the Beloit Daily News, a local newspaper containing 60% ads for local businesses, 20% frighteningly stupid opinion pieces, and 10% local news. There, presumably, they put these low-resolution pieces of copy paper into some archaic machine that turned them into really blotchy, blurry, and grainy newsprint. There was talk of moving the publishing operation to the slightly higher-tech operation at the Janesville newspaper ten miles away with the possibility of COLOR pages, but I’ve fallen out of the loop for this prestigious publication.
My favorite cover I got to do for the annual parody issue. Our Entertainment editor Steve was a sport for being exposed like this along with, yes, a shirtless me to the right.
During my tenure as the layout editor, I worked on a dozen issues. I got to implement some goofy ideas which included:
- Doodle Farm – Just a bunch of doodles from friends’ class notebooks, ranging from equations turning into dogs, bigfoots kissing, to ideas for future restaurants.
- Racecar Stories – I prompted the editorial staff and other creative minds in Beloit to send me short stories and poems about racecars. Poems about palindromic half-formed twins, super sexy spies, and magic sky cars followed.
- Alexander and the Skeleton – No matter how short an issue was, I always included at least one of John McConnell’s comic strips, under the name “Alexander and the Skelleton”. They can all be seen here.
- Frisbee Fan Fiction – John and I combined our favorite fandoms (John doing X-Men and Harry Potter, Star Trek for me) with stories of campus pick-up teams in long and passionate tales of adventure and creepy descriptions of our classmates’ bodies.
Most of my written content came in the form of introductory paragraphs and coming up with clever headlines, most of which are lost to history.
Perk of being the guy who does the cover: Inserting Talking Heads jokes.
It was a fun and rewarding experience working on the Round Table. Having a century-and-a-half old newspaper at your disposal to use is something I miss to this day. Although I still function without sleep, biking around asking people for articles, and yell at scanners a whole lot, it is not within the confines of a newspaper or any other such respectable publication.
This is not a threat.
Hard to tell from the awful copy of it, but we are burning the tiny Beloit College effigy I made.
A lousy photo of a diorama I created to be the cover of the Round Table a year after I left commemorating the departure of college president John Burris.
Late nights in the smoking lounge were an important part of the Beloit, and especially Round Table, experience.
Thanks to Celeste for scanning composites of the Round Table covers that I have lost in my travels.
Tags: art, Beloit College, editing, publishing, Roundtable
