I point out things that prove that the past is a foreign country often enough that I have a blog tag for that purpose. When I first entered the work force, the conditions Ken Whyte describes for employees and managers at a publishing company weren’t all that uncommon (although they were already edging toward the endangered species list):
Fifty years ago, when Richard Charkin […] began his career in the book trade, telephones were wired to desktops and editors (male) wrote their letters and memos in longhand, turning them over to women in the typing pool who knocked them out on carbon paper because the publishing world was slow to photocopiers.
Employees smoked at their desks and drank at lunch. Men wore suits and ties and hats; women long skirts. Living wages were paid and even mid-level jobs came with a car. It was not uncommon for people to spend their whole careers at a single company.
Charkin started at Pergamon Press, an Oxford-based scientific publisher. It held an annual Miss Pergamon contest, essentially a beauty pageant for female employees. The winner received a titled sash, cloak, crown, and the opportunity to greet VIP visitors at company events. Pergamon was considered a progressive company for its time. Needless to say, this was before the dawn of the HR department. Also before marketing and IT departments, but publishers did have guilds, members of which met to discuss business at the pub.
In the mid-1970s, Charkin moved from Pergamon to Oxford University Press, which had traditions of its own. For instance, fortnightly editorial conferences were held at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays (but not in summer when everyone was off on extended vacations). Editors attended in robes and sat around an enormous table. In front of them were inkwells filled with fresh ink.
Charkin worked out of OUP’s Ely House offices in Mayfair. Tea ladies pushed trolleys down the corridors once in the morning and again in the afternoon, dispensing drinks and biscuits. There were three dining rooms on the premises: “one in the basement for all staff, which provided hearty and generously subsidized fare, while on the second floor there was an officers’ dining room, reserved for editors and middle managers, where meals were prepared by a fine chef and the drinks were free. At the very top of the building was the publisher’s dining room, which was exclusively for the use of the head of the London office … and his guests. The food here was sourced from Jackson’s of Piccadilly and the wine list was excellent, with the cellar being overseen by a senior manager at OUP whose job involved spending at least a month in France every year researching and ordering directly from vignerons.”
Class distinctions were rigid enough that two sets of bike racks were required, one for editors, the other for printers. There were a lot of printers: OUP still manufactured its own books and made its own paper, that very thin but indestructible variety once common in Bibles.
You’ll be shocked to learn that Oxford University Press, in operation since 1478, was in deep financial trouble by the 1980s.
In Toronto, this sort of thing was common in the bigger, long-established firms like banks, insurance companies, and even the major grocery chains (the Dominion head office facilities were reportedly top-notch in their day). I imagine it was even more the case in places like New York and Chicago.
