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The Long Transition: 1993-1996

For at least the first three years of the 90s, Barbara Quinn Schmidt hinted with increasing urgency that she would like to pass the editorship of VPR on to someone new. She had wrought significant changes in VPR, but the publication of the journal continued to be an ad hoc venture carried on by Barbara, several supporters at SIU-Edwardsville, and students in selected classes. In those pre-desktop publishing days, setting up the publication, printing, binding, bundling, and mailing demanded a serious commitment of time from the staff she had assembled, and, as she confided to me, the fun was beginning to wear off. The crisis came for RSVP at the 1992 meeting at Manchester Polytechnic University; with no other volunteers, and faced with the reality that VPR would cease as an important critical journal without an editor, I stepped up as interim until Penny Kanner's search committee could unearth someone who could do the job justice. Barbara assured me that editing VPR would be a piece of cake, especially since I had access to key technical expertise through the faculty and resources of my community college. When I reminded her that I had no editing experience whatsoever and no Victorianists on campus to turn to for support, she pooh-poohed my concerns, saying something to the effect that anyone who could edit an institutional accreditation self-study (!) could put out four issues of VPR a year. She also told me that she had the next several issues nearly completed, and that I'd have some lead time to get started on my first issue, 26:3 (Fall 1993). Within a few weeks boxes of files, paper stock, back issues, correspondence, bills, and ledgers arrived. The spring 1993 issue carried the following notice that I had asked Barbara to insert: