Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, ultimately born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a subeditorial job on a women’s weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of Heath-fires (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of a still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett’s, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiousities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of pensive dillettantism.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
The appeal of Arts & Letters Daily is in its reliability and lack of fuss. The site has few ads and no bells or whistles. Bucking the Internet habit of spreading content maddeningly over numerous pages—to inflate “page views” and thus appear more attractive to advertisers—ALD is almost entirely contained on a single scrollable page, modeled, Dutton said, on the 18th-century broadsheet. His aim, first and foremost, was to make the site suitable to its purpose. He tried to instill Arts & Letters Daily with the atmosphere of a Victorian reading room or an athenaeum—a place for reading and thinking, free from distractions.
