December 13, 2002
Lots of business to attend to. We just landed a major account that does 1,800 orders a day and they have agreed to put one of our sub cards in each and every order. This is wonderful and now we’ve got to get a big order of cards which we had printed last year and are on a dock in Virginia, and we are in the process of getting them sent out here, pronto.

Had a good production-ad sales round table yesterday. Asked each person to bring in 3 ads they loved, and three they hated. Very spirited talk about “white space,” vs. clutter, etc. When it got around to Gus, he put our house ad in the “borderline” area. This was an eye-opener and we all talked about taking our own advice. One of the criticisms of the magazine is that it looks too crowded and needless to say this hit close to home. I think everyone learned something and we all want the same thing: a good-looking magazine.

When we finished the Christmas cards two days ago, Abby had the card on the screen and we were all looking at it and critiquing it. I wondered if the copy “Happy Doc Hollidays from the gang at True West” was good enough and somone quipped we should change the word “gang” to “whore”. We laughed hard on that one. Later, I went back out to Abbey and asked her to print me out two of the whore version. I hand cut them and sent one to my partner Bob McCubbin and the other to Bruce Boxleitner with the inscription: “Here’s our new Christmas cards. We got a thousand printed. What do you think?” I’ll run the card tomorrow for you to see.

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: ‘meetings’."
—Dave Barry