DAMERY, J. 2021. ARNOLDIA REIMAGINED. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 2-5 
Arnoldia Reimagined 
Jonathan Damery 
his issue of Arnoldia is devoted primarily to the world of nineteenth- 
century horticulture and botany, the milieu that shaped the Arnold Arbo- 
retum upon its founding in 1872. Yet, in some sense, the issue also repre- 
sents the culmination of a twentieth-century vision for the magazine itself. Next 
year, as part of the Arnold Arboretum’s sesquicentennial celebration, Arnoldia 
will relaunch with a structure and approach that is dynamic and distinctly mod- 
ern. The magazine will still appear in print every quarter and serve as a definitive 
source for novel and interdisciplinary research on trees, shrubs, and landscapes. 
Yet, an updated format will allow for new points of access—new kinds of content. 
In the context of modern publishing, the production of a magazine like Gar- 
dener’s Monthly, which began in Philadelphia in 1859, seems almost inconceiv- 
able. Its editor, Thomas Meehan, would have exchanged feedback with authors 
on handwritten manuscripts. That much can be expected. More miraculous was 
the printing. The final manuscript would have been typeset by hand, each page 
composed of thousands of individual lead characters. Once a page was complete, 
a proofreader would review a test copy, marking errors as an assistant read the 
original manuscript aloud. According to a detailed account of the process for 
producing Harper’s Magazine, outlined in 1865, the initial proofs were often 
rife with errors. After all, the compositor prepared everything backward, in the 
inverse of the printed page. After corrections and additional proofing, the process 
would continue to the individuals responsible for operating the presses, folding 
machines, and so on—an elaborate, labor-intensive coordination of both mechani- 
cal and human power:! 
The Arnold Arboretum’s first foray into magazine publishing was a monthly 
titled Garden and Forest. It debuted in 1888, weeks after Gardener’s Monthly 
ended. Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arboretum, oversaw the 
magazine for its ten-year run, but the editorial offices were in New York, a few 
blocks from the printer: Harpers and Brothers. (Harper’s Magazine was produced 
in the same building.) Arnoldia was born as The Bulletin of Popular Information 
in 1911, and for the next fifty-nine years, the periodical was typeset by hand, using 
the same basic method employed for Gardener’s Monthly. The final person to 
perform the tedium of creating Arnoldia word by word, line by line was Howard 
Allgaier, the printer for the Harvard University Botanical Museum. Allgaier began 
producing the publication in 1933, at the behest of Oakes Ames, the supervisor of 
the Arnold Arboretum. Ames, a bibliophile, was known to say that “a botanist’s 
research should be a jewel worthy of a proper setting.”’” 
Ames also widened the purview of the Bulletin. For its first two decades, the 
periodical had focused almost entirely on plants growing at the Arnold Arbore- 
tum, but in 1931, the format shifted to standalone, topical articles. Ames wrote 
several of these, including one on the botanical drawings of John Singer Sargent. 
Facing page: In the early 1930s, when Arnoldia was still known as The Bulletin of Popular 
Information, an interdisciplinary spirit emerged that continues to inspire the magazine today. 
Blanche Ames provided its first contemporary illustrations. 
ARCHIVES OF THE ARNOLD ARBORETUM 
