20 Years of Interim

Jim Dorsett wrote the "In The Interim" column, which he described as cross between a journal entry, a snapshot, and a letter to friends," in every issue of The Scale Cabinetmaker. It provided him with a place to discuss the goings-on with Dorsett Publicatitons, and later with the restoration of the Christiansburg Station. As Dorsett Publications begins yet another phase, we will be adding new interim columns, but for now the original "In the Interim" columns are reprinted below.

Dorsett
Publications

At the End.....

Chapter 1: In the Beginning (1976-1982)
Chapter 2: The Middle Years (1982-Summer, 1990)
Chapter 3: After Helen (Fall 1990 - August 1996)
Chapter 4: At the End (Concluding Essay)
Chapter 5: In the Interim: Starting Again

In the Interim...

Mark Twain once described a particular matter as being "as out of place as a Presbyterian in hell." His reference was to the certitude presumably afforded by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. But, while my antecedents are of that stripe, I have never shared the sense of absolute certainty that Twain ascribed to my forebearers, at least as it relates to some aspects of life. However, there has been one area of existence where destiny (or foreordination, if you are a Calvinist) seemed unswerving, i.e.that The Scale Cabinetmaker (and, by implication, myself) would simply continue indefinitely in a perpetual motion that defies the law of physics.

For most of the past twenty years that has seemed to me a perfectly sound assumption. However, during the last two years as a reluctant consumer of the medical arts, I have progressively discovered the symbolism of "The Deacon's Masterpiece": the one horse shay which ran for a hundred years and a day and then fell apart. And the difficult truth has been that the time had come for me to lay down the cudgels at TSC, to choose a date on which "30" would be written at the end of one final article of one final issue, and then to walk reluctantly away from something that has absorbed my interest and energies for two decades.

Last winter, when this handwriting began to appear on the wall, I decided that I would continue through one more volume year, finally laying aside the blue pencil with the completion of the fourth issue in the twentieth volume year (TSC 20:4). And I have proceeded since then on the pasis of that expectation, planning out the year's content. The final issue was to be a summary of TSC's twenty years in print. And I had looked forward with trepidation to it as I have worked on the issues between. But as Bobby Burns noted, "The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley." As the layout for this 20:2 issue grew close to the August 1st deadline, circumstances have made it unmistakeably clear that events have stolen a march on me, that the time for the final "30" at the end of the last article is now, not later.

So it is with a new appreciation of the reply that Adlai Stevenson made to a reporter's question about how it felt to have lost the 1952 Pesidential race to Dwight Eisenhower, "It huts too much to laugh and I am too old to cry," I announce that this is the last issue of The Scale Cabinetmaker.

Occassionally in the past a reader has written to ask what would happen to TSC when I reached a decision to step back from it. And the answer has necessarily been that without a successor there could be only one outcome. Meg Dorsett has brought to these pages over the past two years enthusiasm coupled with first rate skills in writing, editing, graphic design, and publishing. But other career commitments preclude her full-time devostion to the feeding and care of TSC.

Other options for TSC's continuation are precluded by its choice of content and focus. Scale modeling information in an overwhelmingly collector's hobby makes this uninviting stuff for another publisher whose bottom line depends on readership size and advertising revenues. To such publishers, TSC has always appeared a bit of a vagrant, "showing no visible means of support" beyond the unfathonable devotion of its scale modeling readership.

Over these years of TSC's life, after all the rest of the content for a new issue has been put together, I have turned with a sense of relief to writing this column. It has always been the easiest part to complete, no so much a chore as an opportunity to write a personal note to a friend. If under the pressure of time and necessity many of the things that must be done to get an issue into print have seemed difficult, the Interim has been an unfailing pleasure. And I will miss it as I will miss all of you.

Jim Dorsett