Just in time for Christmas shopping, a letter arrived this week from the Harris Corporation, makers of the typesetting equipment we use at the Gazette to produce the words you’re reading now.

An introductory note explained that the Composition and Controls Division at Harris has cut prices on a number of spare parts -- “items which exceed our forecasted requirements.” We think that means nobody’s buying them.

Early on Saturday morning, a prevailing westerly sweeps the steppe called Martha's Vineyard Airport, and the regional high school football team hustles from the terminal into a potbellied Gull Airlines plane bound for Nantucket and The Game.

Approximately 500 buildings in downtown Edgartown, most of them wood frame houses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are now part of a nationally recognized historic district.

Linwood J. Belisle of Edgartown — you’ve seen his Lin’s Lawn Mower Repair shingle on the Vineyard Haven Road — enlisted as a parachuter 42 years ago looking for adventure and some extra cash.

The Vineyard Gazette this week completed its first major building expansion and renovation at South Summer street and Davis Lane in Edgartown, the newspaper’s home since early 1939. This Sunday, as the newspaper enters its 139th year of publishing without missing a single issue, the Gazette will open its doors to all the Vineyard community from noon to 5 p.m. for a house warming and public inspection.

Everything, including our culture, was very old fashioned in 1920. The location of the Gazette office, even, was on the second floor of a building, long since replaced by the liquor store and real estate modernities at the Four Corners, so called, at Main and North and South Water streets in Edgartown.