Editor’s Note: The following essay and accompanying photograph are taken from the book Martha’s Vineyard Now and Zen by Susan Klein and Alan Brigish. They appear here with permission and were submitted to the Gazette by the authors this week to mark the occasion of the change in ownership last week. Martha’s Vineyard Now and Zen is for sale in Island bookstores and online at mv-zen.com.

A summer subscription to My Weekly Reader, offering a wee glimpse of the world I longed to know about, brought the single-fold, four-page piece of newsprint to my home — delivery date: Friday, just like the Vineyard Gazette. I’d spread out my tiny tabloid as my mother spread out the great acreage of the Gazette and we two intellectuals would gobble up the news in a ritual of rare silence, transported by the written word.

The Gazette boasts an unbroken publishing history since 1846. The ambiance of the newsroom is no longer punctuated by the clatter and zing of typewriters pounded by reporters working to deadline. Instead, beneath the soft hum of technology, one senses a near-palpable thrum of sentences forming and sequencing in the minds of the reporters, as the paragraphs tick and click into computer keyboards, the newsroom now a busy, but not frantic clearinghouse for the ebb and flow of Island events, layers of lifestyles, and the dark and light aspects of our lives on the Atlantic fringe. The paper includes the bold headlines of “the tangled webs we weave” and complex modern issues, but also a lot of good news, hardly a noteworthy national trend, but very much a part of the Gazette tradition.

Weekly (and twice a week in summer) the Gazette snaps at a rapid rate from the offset press at the longest-running, uninterrupted business in Edgartown, the pressman and his assistants checking, collating, stacking, inserting — in a swirl of preparation for dissemination to Islanders as well as the 5,000 off-Island subscribers who wait each week for that rolled up package to arrive. Then, in homes all across the globe, they spread out one of the last dozen broadsheets in America, and participate in a time-honored ritual, learning about a place they love, transported by the written word.