Now that I have your attention, the situation at Granta is still really confusing! But it’s gotten a little less confusing, so there’s that.

On Wednesday, I wrote about the weird closed-mouth policy at Granta regarding the magazine’s month-long spate of high-level departures. Well, yesterday the Guardian’s Alison Flood got a bunch of people connected to the journal to comment on the record, including owner/synergy enthusiast Sigrid Rausing and former editor John Freeman, and the results are fascinating, if not entirely illuminating.

The best comments came, as they always do, from anonymous “insiders.” One described the situation at Granta as a “total shit storm,” while another, likely fearing that the “shit storm” insider’s comments weren’t British enough, described it as a “complete bloody disaster.” Why the “bloody shit storm”? At least one of the insiders appears to have indicated to Flood that “It is understood to boil down to a desire by Granta‘s owner to save money, as the company continues to make a loss.”

Comments given to Flood separately by Freeman and Rausing suggest that money is, in fact, the heart of the matter, but their individual comments—and the discrepancies between them—are telling.

Freeman told Flood that:

“Sigrid decided a while back she wanted to run the magazine and books on a very reduced staff”, and that he “didn’t want to be part of that change, or the smaller ship, because I’ve seen us make huge reductions in our losses by growing. Working as a team”.

“I decided it was a good time to get out. And I quit,” he said. “I’ll miss it, though, we had a lot of fun and a lot of momentum, so did the books…. It’s a great magazine. But in the end it is her property and as she’s showing she’s going to do with it what she wants.”

While Rausing had this to say:

“People have left for different reasons, not all of them related… John Freeman wanted to re-locate to New York, and decided to leave, which led us to the decision to close the NYC office. His deputy, Ellah Allfrey, felt that with a new London-based editor, her own job would change, and she decided that she wanted to pursue other things.

“Michael Salu, our art director, wanted to go freelance, which meant closing our art department. And Philip Gwyn-Jones is leaving because his role as executive publisher became redundant when I decided to take those aspects on myself.”

“Closing the NYC office, and the art department, will certainly be a cost saving,” she continued. “Publishing is going through rocky times – we are lucky because I can afford the subsidy, which means that we can do things that maybe harder for other publishers. The magazine I don’t think will ever be profitable, but I am certainly hoping that the book side will make money.”

Regardless of what kick-started the present “shit storm”—whether it was Freeman’s decision to move to New York or Rausing’s decision to reduce the staff—both Freeman and Rausing seem to agree that Granta’s financial situation is at the center of it. But Rausing, in her comments, seems to want to have it both ways. The decision to close the NYC office and the art department is BOTH part of a general plan to make the magazine more profitable AND inevitable as the result of the (totally unrelated, guys) departures of Freeman and Salu, respectively.

In Rausing’s convoluted version of events, cost-cutting measures seem to fall into her lap, as if by accident. (John Freeman wants to move to New York! Let’s close the NYC office, then! How lucky!) Freeman’s simpler version of events, in which Rausing wanted to reduce the staff and he did not want to play a part in that decision, strikes me as the more accurate one (that said, I am a sucker for Occam’s razor).

Still, perhaps Rausing is right—perhaps all Granta needs is a little bit of synergy and the journal will come out of this mess better than ever. But while the Guardian story answers some of the questions observers have been asking over the last month, Granta‘s long-term and short-term future remains uncertain. The departures of the supremely talented Freeman and Gwyn-Jones, the seeming confusion as to how to respond to Granta’s rocky financial situation, and the conflicting messages sent out by the magazine’s departing editor and publisher suggest Granta’s difficulties are here to stay—at least for the next little while. As novelist Peter Carey told Flood:

“It’s crazy because it undoes all the good work and they have to start all over again. If there’s another John Freeman out there, I doubt he’ll be applying. Maybe they don’t know whether they want to run it for its own sake or to make money. Very strange.”

Very strange indeed.

In the report local libraries go back to the future

Yesterday, Arts Council England (ACE) published its report into the future of local libraries. ‘Envisioning the library of the future’ is ‘a major research project undertaken over the past year’ during which time 800 people were interviewed, 1,400 reposes were received in an online survey and 10,000 people viewed an online conversation. ACE has clearly taken the time to do its research and is priding itself on gathering this research and making conclusions that will ‘help library staff, funders and users to better understand what libraries could and should look like in the future.’

Great stuff. Except it’s not. Because the report has identified four ‘priority areas for development’ which state the four things we definitely already knew about libraries. These are:

1. Place the library as the hub of the community

2. Make the most of digital technology and creative media

3. Ensure that libraries are resilient and sustainable

4. Deliver the right skills for those who work in libraries

In response to this, I offer:

1. Libraries are already the ‘hub’ (what a word) of the community; that’s why both ordinary people and celebrities are campaigning so vehemently to save them

2. Sure, if this help people learn vital IT skills. Not so good if it’s a way of closing down the physical spaces. The old and unemployed are in there learning how to send an email or accessing the internet which they can’t afford at home. They need those things first. Also—what the heck is ‘creative media’?

3. As the report very correctly states at its outset, ‘There is a clear, compelling and continuing need for a publicly funded library service.’ So time to add ‘reliable funding’ to ‘resilient and sustainable’.

4. This will be much harder to do if volunteers replace a trained, skilled and paid workforce.

In the report’s introduction Alan Davey, the Chief Executive of  ACE, writes that due to a focus on immediate concerns, such as cuts to local council funding which is resulting in the closing of libraries around the country (in Manchester, for example), an ‘understanding of how libraries will contribute to the future success and well-being of this country hasn’t developed.’ But isn’t that because many fear that they won’t have a future? And at this time of deep insecurity, are the four priority areas really the best ideas for the future that ACE, and all those they interviewed, can come up with?

I’d love to see a list with gusto; one that didn’t seem to contain a strong feeling of defeat within its objectives. Each point seems defensive, as though answering a number of criticisms: libraries don’t do enough for their communities, libraries haven’t embraced technology, libraries aren’t working hard enough, library staff aren’t right for the job. And yet, as the report clearly states, public support for libraries has never wavered, ‘It didn’t matter whether they use libraries or not, people are vocal and passionate about their value.’

Library campaigners have picked up on these lacklustre objectives, commenting:

“There is very little in the Envisioning report that has not been seen before in numerous other reports. It is still keeping its head in the sand about the extent of cuts, and is not proposing solid suggestions for steps that people should be taking. It also completely fails to mention any sort of new leadership for libraries, which is what the service needs.”

I’m no expert, and I haven’t interviewed 800 people, but here are four, more specific objectives, that I like the sound of:

1. Each library is different. But they can learn from each other. Find the libraries that are working well and use those— and their managers—to lead others.

2. Give communities and their leaders the business support and tools they need to direct how they run the libraries themselves in their area.

3. If libraries are losing their funding, find ways to direct funding into them. Can we use them to train young people, develop community gardens, run not-for-profit cafes? Or how about renting the space out in the evenings?

4. Libraries educate. To secure their future, schools, academies, higher learning colleges and small businesses should be working in closer conjunction with their local libraries. If they become embedded within other institutions, they cannot be so easily separated and closed down.

Local libraries need funding. But they also need clear direction which has positivity at its heart. We need to know how to save our libraries now, and most importantly, we need to ensure they are part of our future.

For a time, Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was the second most banned book in the United States; the most banned book was And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. “Apparently the ambitious book-banners of the United States thought two gay penguins were more dangerous than a reservation Indian boy who mentions that he likes masturbation,” he jokes.

Filmed in February during the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute, Alexie’s speech focuses on the positive letters he’s received from fans, especially boys.

“I know that there are kids who need these books, and I know there are kids like me, who aren’t frightened by these books, but dream of them. Immodestly speaking, I only wish when I was young and growing up on the reservation that there was a book like mine about alcoholism, death, destruction, violence, and yes, masturbation, because that’s real life.”

Anderson’s speech begins with a reminder that she has four kids of her own, and that she knows how scary it can be to parent a teenager. As the author of Speak, she talks about the difficulty of addressing sexuality with young adults when they are “exposed to unprecedented amounts of sexual behavior.” But banning books isn’t the answer, she says.

“Literature is the safe, and the traditional vehicle, that mankind has used to pass morals, lessons, and wisdom on from generation to generation. The modern way of saying that is: books save lives. We do that with contemporary young adult literature. It surprises people, and scares some, because it’s an accurate reflection of the way that today’s teenagers talk and think, and the issues that they’re dealing with. Our books have to be honest in order to connect to the teen reader today. American teens are desperate for responsible, trustworthy adults to talk to about some of these issues. Sometimes they can only find the answers that they’re seeking—the moral answers, moral guidance—in books.

“…Not allowing kids to think about, talk about, discuss these issues leaves them vulnerable–leaves them in darkness–and it opens up the opportunity for them to be hurt. Censorship is the child of fear, and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them. They need us to be brave enough to give them great books so that they can grow into the strong women and men that we need them to be.”

These videos and readings from a number of banned books are available on the ABFFEE website.

[T]this time the author was in no position to resist the state honours being conferred on him. President [Goodluck] Jonathan reminded funeral attendees of the author’s criticisms of politicians and corruption. After the singing, the long speeches and prayers, this was a moment about which many had been holding their breath.

“For those of you that read The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe told us that there is nothing wrong with Nigeria. The problem is the political leadership,” he said, waving a copy of the novel…

Jonathan went on to read a passage that highlighted the political corruption and manipulation that had afflicted the African oil giant since independence. “That was in Chinua’s last book,” the former professor said. “All of us must work hard to change this country.”

There are a number of things wrong with this—The Trouble with Nigeria is not a novel, nor is it Achebe’s last book—but the speech was supposedly greeted with cautious applause.

The Romantic poets graced Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany with their dramatic lives in 1818.

In the mountains above Lucca in Tuscany, hill towns nestled on tree-lined ridges with dense foliage, wildflowers, grape vines, and narrow roads with hairpin turns, look down over the Lima River Valley onto Bagni di Lucca. The town has been known for its thermal baths since the Estruscan and Roman ages, and was a fashionable spa town in the early 19^th century.

Bagni di Lucca was also a favorite destination of the Romantic poets, including Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had an affair and a child with Lord Byron.

These exiles found political freedom in Italy as revolutionaries and radicals; all of them were advocates of womens’ rights, having been influenced by Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft. They also left for Italy to escape money lenders.

Lord Byron, who was living in Venice, agreed to care for his love child with Claire Clairmont, Allegra, as long as she wouldn’t have anything to do with him anymore, and so Claire sent the fourteen-month-old child with him when she first arrived with the Shelleys in Italy. “I send you my child because I love her too well to keep her,” she wrote. “With you who are powerful and noble and the admiration of the world she will be happy, but I am a miserable and neglected dependant.”

In 1818, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire arrived in Bagni di Lucca, where they leased Casa Bertini near a house once occupied by Montaigne. The town’s scenery and the way the light danced across the surrounding mountains inspired his poem, “The Cloud,” which he wrote the following year. He wrote that he “took great delight in watching the changes of atmosphere…the growth of the thunder showers…which break & fade away towards evening into flocks of delicate clouds.”

Shortly after they arrived, books that had been confiscated from Shelley in Chambéry on their journey from London arrived and Shelley annotated seven volumes of Herodotus’s Histories, he read Aeschylus’s The Persians, Xenophon’s Memorbilia Socratis, Aristophanes’ The Clouds, and Barthelemy’s Anarcharsis. On July 7^th 1818, he started translating the banquet scene of Plato’s Symposium, and he worked on it for eleven consecutive mornings; it took Mary over two weeks to transcribe his work. He also wrote essays On Love and A Discourse, prose about the nature of love and sex while in Bagni di Lucca. While there is no proof or documentation, it is suspected that he was also romantically involved with Claire Clairmont during this time.

On August 17^th, they received word that Allegra was no longer under the care of Lord Byron, and Claire and Percy set out for Venice. Byron had been living with nine women, fourteen servants, and “a menagerie of monkeys, a wolf, a fox, two mastiffs, and caged birds” and the Hoppners, a British couple, felt that this was not an appropriate setting for a young child. Byron didn’t let Claire near her child and arranged to place her in a Capuchin convent in Bagnacavallo, Italy. Allegra later died of  typhus at the age of five, and Claire blamed Byron.

Meanwhile back in Bagni di Lucca, Mary Shelley was receiving glowing reviews of Frankenstein, which she had written in Geneva, and had been published earlier in 1818. But tragedy struck a few short years later. On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno in his boat, Don Juan. He was cremated on a funeral pyre on the beach not far from where he drowned.

Penguin

Lest you think Penguin was holding out for a good deal: it ended up paying more than all of the other publishing defendants, at a total cost of more than $90 million in payments and fees. By contrast, according to PublishersLunch, the total bill will be “more than the $78.9 million paid by the first three Settlers combined.”

The New York Times phrases the cost to Penguin at a much smaller amount, reporting only $75 million in consumer damages “plus costs and fees.” But, as the PublishersLunch dispatch clarifies, the fees add up to nearly $15 million…. a enormously bad break for Penguin. To put that number in context:

Hachette had incurred the largest penalty, paying $31.7 million in compensation, plus costs… When Macmillan settled earlier this year, they agreed to pay $20 million in consumer restitution and roughly $6 million more in costs and fees. Total consumer payments secured now add up to $164 million, with another $31 million or so in costs and fees.

In a press release, the law firm of Hagens Berman, which “was appointed lead counsel to represent the rights of consumers in the consolidated class-action lawsuit first filed on Aug. 9, 2011,” claims credit for the savvy negotiations that led to the massive settlement, but it’s hard to imagine that the size of the settlement is anything other than punishment for Penguin’s threatening to go to trial.

The size of the settlement and related fees likely come as something of a shock to even Penguin, which, in a February 2012 filling, estimated possible charges at only $40 million.

The settlement is subject to court approval, but if accepted Penguin would withdrawal from the trial scheduled to begin June 3, which will—if all goes according to plan—have only one defendant, Apple, now said by the government to be the “ringleader” of a conspiracy to raise ebook prices.

Jeff Bezos is my new favorite Marty Stu.

“Blair,” Jeff whispered, his lips almost touching her earlobe, “I have something I need to tell you.”

“Jeff, please,” Blair danced away. She laughed coyly, mercilessly. They’d both had too much to drink.

“It’s important you listen to me, Blair.” Jeff ran his hands over his gleaming scalp. He was sweating.

“Fine, talk, ” she said, looking away. “But don’t bore me, Jeff. I’m warning you. There are plenty of other rich boys in tight pants at this party, and some of them can dance.”

The air was heavy in this velvet-curtained room on Park Avenue. Her necklace glinted in the lights from cars passing far below.

“Blair, I’ve started a new program to make money off of fan fiction,” he pleaded. “I’m letting authors sell stories on a platform I’m calling Kindle Worlds. We’ve licensed three so-called ‘worlds’ from one company, to start. So now authors can submit fan fiction using the plots, setting, and characters of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, or The Vampire Diaries.”

Blair stalked past him over to the balcony doors. “Jeff, that sounds like a fine and interesting thing. So good, in fact, that I find it all a little…” she tossed her hair and let her empty martini glass fall to the deeply carpeted floor “…boring.”

“Wait, wait!” Jeff could feel himself growing shrill. He wished he had a bookseller or temp worker or British Prime Minister to rough up. That always calmed him down. “It’s not so simple. I’m paying the fan fiction authors, it’s true, but at half the rates I pay the rest of our self-publishing authors. And the licensing is downright evil!”

Blair opened the heavy balcony doors and the city noise, the city air, rushed in. It smelled of youth and wealth and a hint of her perfume.

“Listen…” Jeff unfolded his arm and revealed the bioelectric screen embedded there beneath his definitely-not-the-Borg-because-we-don’t-have-licenses-for-that-franchise human skin camouflage. “This is from our first announcement about the program:

Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.

You will own the copyright to the original, copyrightable elements (such as characters, scenes, and events) that you create and include in your work, and the World Licensor will retain the copyright to all the original elements of the World. When you submit your story in a World, you are granting Amazon Publishing an exclusive license to the story and all the original elements you include in that story. This means that your story and all the new elements must stay within the applicable World. We will allow Kindle Worlds authors to build on each other’s ideas and elements. We will also give the World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.”

Long form journalism is time-consuming, research-intensive, and often expensive to produce. How does anyone continue to publish it? What recent changes in journalism are most apparent to you?

“I think the biggest change that could cause people to present this ‘long form is dead’ mentality is the STRONG emergence of the type of and sheer volume of new media,” said Shankman. “The emergence and shininess of [Tweets, Facebook updates, and pageview turning blog posts] have just taken the spotlight off of long form to a certain degree.”

“The most important shift in the last five years,” said Lammer, “has been the move to mobile. The web browser is a crappy place to read at any length, and phones and tablets are built for it…. As smartphones and tablets become completely commonplace (we’re already close), the audience will grow, and I expect a diverse set of publishers will connect with them.”

“The main change,” wrote Ratliff, “that’s most apparent is that an area that five years ago was considered a backwater, being drained of its life by the heartless Web, is now bordering on some kind of trend. In some ways I’m not sure which is more scary. But more and more places are concluding that their readers may not be idiots, and that actually a lot of people still want—or even need—context and beauty amidst their daily deluge of information. And that to me can only be a good thing.

“It’s still a struggle for writers to make a living creating this kind of work. But the truth is, at least in my career, it’s always been so.”

How can publishers make the work remunerative for writers?

Ratliff says of The Avatist, “Readers pay for what they want, and a lot of what they pay gets passed right through to the author. Because we are doing direct sales, and not relying on advertising, it’s much easier to share royalties from each story with the writers. And I think that’s a model (a fee + a royalty that’s usually 50%) that allows us to get a lot of great work. We’ve paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and royalties in two years. A writer is taking on more risk with us than they are with a typical fee-based magazine piece (although depending on who they write for, our fees may even be competitive). But they also have a much bigger possibility for an upside… I would never suggest that our model is something that publications should replicate. We’re one way of approaching it, mixing book sales model with a magazine approach, and ask readers to pay for the work.

“Whether long form work within that model is remunerative at some acceptable level for writers has too many variables to calculate. People write for all sorts of reasons, different types of writing may or may not deserve different levels of remuneration depending on where you are sitting.”

Editors from The Awl discussed this at length in a conversation on Branch. Some writers said they’d consider working for free to build professional relationships or get a byline at a new publication.

What about the economics of long form?

“Anecdotally, I’ve heard that for many [publishers], long form stories drive a significant portion of their monthly unique [views], so there are some clear upsides,” said Lammer.

“Longform doesn’t publish original writing (we occasionally seek out the rights to reprint something great that isn’t online) so I can’t speak directly to the economics.  The trajectory we’ve seen in three years of running Longform is that more great work is being produced and from a wider variety of sources.

“Stories that get linked to from Longform are produced everywhere from the biggest magazines and newspaper all the way down to personal blogs, so there isn’t a consistent economic model for them. Some appear in print and online, some originate on the web, some are produced by non-profits with grant funding, others might even be sponsored content.”

Ratliff adds, “We actually do two things at Atavist: publish digital long form journalism (sometimes now called “e-singles”), and we make a software platform that other people and organizations pay us to use. So we have found multiple ways of making money, and they are all mixed up together. All of which is to say that we have found some ways to make money creating digital long form, but that doesn’t always mean that it is always profitable in and of itself.

“We’ve been working to combine single-copy sales with subscriptions, foreign sales, movie deals, and more to try and make each piece worth its while.”

What do you believe is a responsible way to handle sponsored content?

Shankman said, “The minute you try to fool the audience or present something that’s a terrible fit, you get in trouble. My experience, though, has shown as long as you are honest about what kind of content this is and its origins (sponsored versus pure editorial), the readers are cool with it and it makes for effective marketing.”

Longform doesn’t do sponsored content, but it does promote its sponsors weekly. “We try to label them well and not clutter the site with too many of them, and since they’re only once a week, people seem to click through, which is nice for everyone involved,” said Lammer.

When does it stop being a marketplace?

“The only time it really stops being a marketplace is when a publication has some source of outside funding (whether it’s a non-profit approach or something else) that will continue no matter what audience you have,” said Ratliff.

“Otherwise, no publication, including us, can completely ignore what it readers want and plan to be around for very long. We have both the advantage and disadvantage that it’s often very hard to tell what will catch on and what won’t, when it comes to long form nonfiction sold as e-singles. So that makes it hard to pick winners, but also gives us the freedom to do stories that we feel are worth telling, without always focusing on sales. But one reason I always emphasize that we’re not trying to create some kind of generalized model for other publications is that there are certain stories that probably just won’t ever work as well in this format.”

Longform‘s model is a bit different than the others; it has had NPR as an ad partner for the three years since the publication began. Lammer said, “The only shift [in those three years] has been towards getting more of what we do—our podcast, newsletter, etc.—sponsored. Currently, the Longform app has no advertising.”

What’s coming in the next five years?

Lammers predicts, “Readers will probably focus more on the writers they like than the publications who put them out, and significant numbers of writers will probably shift to publishing directly. I think a blurring of the difference between article and book will probably follow, with lots of writers focusing on delivering 50-100 page works that can be read in a few hours.”

When asked if he planned to launch other verticals, Shankman answered, “Possibly? Definitely maybe?”

Ratliff says, “If I had even moderate predictive powers, I’d be out at my local OTB right now.”

I can’t say I disagree with the vandalism.

When a sign is typo-laden, what is being conveyed? Carelessness? Artlessness? Lawlessness? I walk through an installation, whether in a museum or in a courtyard, partly to take pleasure in how the placards contextualize the work, even if they reveal only the year or the artist’s name. If consistency and clarity are evident in the signage—as Xu Bing insists in his experimental novella, Book from the Ground, which consists solely of signs—then so too authority of the art being presented.

Unless, of course, the signage is meant to call attention to itself.

This is the loose theory held by some of my fellow production editors, copy editors, and proofreaders, whom I like to poll for opinions and observations about all things punctuation-driven. (None of them, by the way, cop to being the vandal.)

Meryl Gross, an associate managing editor, starts off with:

As a Pratt alum I can only say that I wish someone would edit the sculptures as well. When I was there, we tossed folding chairs off rootftops and got graded on it: now, that was sculpture.

To which John Wolfman, a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, adds:

In my experience with art schools, good writing, without typos, is considered to be the mark of someone who’s not a real artist. You’re expected to be a sloppy writer (as long as you remember to use whatever clichés are in vogue: “paradigm” is de rigueur).

Rosa, a former editor of Grapefruit: An Occasional for the Bibliophiles says:

The typos and writing errors on the plaques are like potholes in a road: they cause a bump or jolt as you read. Your brain works to correct them instead of absorbing the information smoothly and remaining focused on the artwork. Then the corrections to the typos, made in this overt way, add further bumps to the road, so that the viewer is now entirely distracted by the plaque and the quality of its text—and taken out of his or her engagement with the work of art. The art is now secondary to the plaque.

Kevin Bourke, a senior production editor, says:

I love that the [New York Times] comments are on the side of the copy editors. The human interaction—perhaps better described as audience participation instead of vandalism—is something I imagine the artists probably enjoy. It doesn’t sound like anyone at the school itself is complaining about this, and it saves Pratt the expense of having to make revised placards.

Am I the vigilante? I carry with me only Waterman pens, not Sharpies.

And Mareike Grover, a senior production editor, asks:

Perhaps that Vigilante Copy Editor is a guerrilla artist? The edits themselves could be seen as artworks in progress. Perhaps if you string them together and play them backward, they form a message.

The overall conclusion from my colleagues is that Pratt needs to hire a copy editor. John McPhee recounts the story of how Eleanor Gould was taken in by The New Yorker, in 1925, as its general copy editor, and remained at the job for fifty-four years:

When [Gould] finished [reading a copy of The New Yorker with a blue pencil in hand], the magazine was a mottled blue on every page—a circled embarrassment of dangling modifiers, conflicting pronouns, absent commas, and over-all grammatical hash. She mailed the marked-up copy to Harold Ross, the founding editor, and Ross was said to have bellowed. What he bellowed was “Find this bitch and hire her!”

*

I contacted Dockendorf to see if the Vigilant Copy Editor ever surfaced. The answer is yes and no: After the New York Times article and video appeared, VCE sent him an e-mail via his website to thank him for “the flattery.” They made a date to meet one Monday by the cannon in Pratt’s courtyard, but two hours before the set time, VCE canceled, preferring perhaps to keep up the “romanticism,” as VCE put it, of not being known. Dockendorf has not heard from the vigilante since.

Dockendorf concludes in his e-mail:

When I last checked a few days before the piece went live on the Times, some of the placards were still marked; Pratt scrubbed most of them clean in the past year. I saw some new copy-minded graffiti recently that looked unusual. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, so I suspect others have taken up the mantel from VCE, who first struck (to the best of my knowledge) in summer of 2012, and whose handwriting by now I know well.