The linotype machine ranks with the invention of the printing press itself in importance to the printer of today. And now the Vineyard Gazette has bridged the gap from the old era to the new.
The Gazette announces this week the opening of a Vineyard Haven office.
For a great many years this newspaper has carried under the heading on its front page these words: “Devoted to the interests of the six towns on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.”
In short the Gazette has always been an island newspaper, devoted to the interests of Martha’s Vineyard. Now this purpose may be made more real through active representation in Vineyard Haven.
With this issue of the Gazette the undersigned, after over thirty-two years’ occupancy of its editorial chair, vacates the same, having this week sold the paper and its goodwill to Henry Beetle Hough, a gentlemen, who, by reason of education, training and family tradition, will we believe carry the GAZETTE to a yet wider sphere of influence and to a high prosperity.
Today the Gazette comes before you under a new management. In assuming the responsibility of publishing the same we feel that we are accepting a public trust, which can be held only so long as we can fill it acceptably to the people of this town and county. This feeling comes to us when we remember how, week after week for many years, the paper has come to your firesides, until the people have learned to look upon it as one of the veteran institutions of the Island, to be sustained and supported accordingly.
After an unequal contest of more than four years at the editorial chair of the VINEYARD GAZETTE we resign our duties to other hands. We do not drop the pen without regret, for, with the many unpleasant issues that arise from such a position, there must be some agreeable associations to which, in all coming time, we shall look back with pleasure, and shall only regret that mingled with these associations there should be some unpleasant memories of the perversity and selfishness of humanity.
The seventeenth volume of the Gazette closed with its last issue, and to-day it enters upon a new year with a new editor and proprietor. The undersigned, after seventeen years of constant labor, as editor of the paper, retires, and Mr. James M. Cooms, Jr., a graduate of the office, assumes the entire control of the establishment. I know Mr.
We present to our readers this morning, the first number of “The Vineyard Gazette,” and are happy to state that our subscription list is well filled, our advertising patronage respectable.
The great storm had wheeled off into the Canadian Maritimes about 45 hours before, leaving a jungle of limbs and power lines almost two stories high on the corner of South Summer street and Davis Lane, just outside the Vineyard Gazette office in Edgartown.
There’s little to record in the history of the printer’s art between the invention of movable type in the early 1400s by Johannes Gutenberg and the first publication of the Vineyard Gazette some four hundred years later. In fact, if Joe Gutenberg could have been brought back to stand in front of the old Adams press still on display in the Gazette’s downstairs museum area, he certainly could have printed the first papers himself.
