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Thanks, Maria, for the recent issues of G&DA. What a smart attractive magazine it has become! I see many differences between now and Way Back When, and a few similarities too. The biggest contrast is your use of color everywhere: no big deal for any magazine today, but almost totally beyond our state-of-the-art (and budget) in those letterpress days [Kleinshrod was G&DA's editorial director in the 1960s]. Except for our feature section, printed in offset by a separate shop, all our text was set in hot metal, our half-tone illustrations bulk-shipped to our main printer as “cuts,” wood blocks topped with copper engravings. To save time sending proofs back and forth, we'd sometimes close issues at the printer, near Park Row in lower Manhattan.

Other differences — so many! Your use of live models, your excellent theme product shots, new (to me, anyway) product categories like music CDs and personal care and titles like senior Web editor, plus affiliates in China and India. Similarities? A few advertisers like Kurt Adler, Gift Box Corp. and Little Management. Also the fact that you're still Paid Circulation, an article of faith with [then-owner] Don McAllister.

I enjoyed your editorials, especially the one about T-ball. The sponsors' names you recall on t-shirts years ago — businesses now all gone, but replaced by new sponsors like Antiques Plus — echoes the experience Pat and I had on our recent Ohio River cruise through areas I'd covered for G&DA in the Fifties, an area then alive with china, glass and pottery manufacturers. Main streets in towns along the river were all but dead, or struggling to survive with antiques shops. Blenko Glass, Fenton and a few other firms remain, but the rest are only remembered in museums. Yet beyond these forlorn downtowns, over the hill somewhere, there are Kmarts, Wal-Marts and Targets. It's the 21st Century.

— Walter Kleinshrod