Those of us privileged to edit this magazine greet the shipment of each issue with relief--and anxiety. Will our readers like what we have wrought? After the last intense weeks of refining texts, selecting photographs, and rereading galleys, will we still like it? Like parents, we want to be proud of our progeny, and we hope they travel well.

Catherine A. Chute, PublisherPhotograph by Jim Harrison

Focused on the contents, we can easily forget who else makes the creation of Harvard Magazine possible. Long before each issue shows up in your mailbox--or on your computer screen--we must buy paper in hundred-thousand-pound lots, and postage and printing services to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. We pay authors and artists (not much, but something). In short, we are a business.

Our financial enterprise is a three-legged stool. We receive revenues from advertisers; from the generous readers who make voluntary contributions each year; and from the University, in the form of an annual subvention. The magazine's success requires sophisticated advertising sales, efficient and appropriate direct-mail operations, and constant investments in new technology.

Managing those responsibilities falls to our publisher. So does the challenge of articulating the magazine's business plan. With the arrival of Catherine A. Chute as publisher, we welcome an energetic professional who is ideally suited to lead our business operations.

Cathy comes to Cambridge after more than a decade at the New York Times Company, where she worked in circulation, advertising sales, new media, and magazine marketing. A 1981 Princeton graduate in comparative literature who later completed a master's in management at Yale, she brings to her new job a genuine appreciation of special academic communities like this one. With her arrival, Harvard Magazine is all the better prepared to continue serving our readers worldwide, to plan our centennial celebration in 1998, and to ready ourselves to report on the lives and work of Harvardians in the new millennium.

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As Cathy Chute unpacked her belongings, Mary Ann O'Brien, the magazine's comptroller since 1995, packed hers. She is moving across campus to work on creating much more efficient financial and human-resources systems for Harvard. Mary Ann brought order and discipline to the magazine's increasingly complex finances; we deeply appreciate her enormous contributions here.

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Harvard Yard would be inconceivable, intellectually and physically, without Widener Library. The same could be said of the Law School's Langdell, the Business School's Baker, the Medical School's Countway. By chance, many of our pages in two consecutive issues concern the libraries. "Biblioklepts," the March-April cover story, dealt with their vulnerability to criminal abuse. "Scholars in the Stacks" reminds us why it is vital that the libraries remain readily available to inquiring minds.

~John A. Rosenberg

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