The Record Runs Out of Paper

Charlie Knight '20 | Editor in Chief

In an unprecedented oversight, The Hotchkiss Record has run out of paper and must resort to a fully electronic issue this week.

We sincerely apologize for this egregious oversight. Usually, our executive board pulps trees by hand in order to obtain enough artisan wood fibers to turn into newspaper many months in advance. We then hand-draw every letter, image, and cartoon from scratch, with each of us finishing 250 newspapers in total. All through the night, we painstakingly work to give each paper the uniformity of a printed piece.

Tragically, our wood pulp sample for this issue contained freakish amounts of the highly variable biopolymer lignin, either due to an abnormal individual variation in the trees used or due to the trees’ lack of maturity. Because newspapers and other fragile paper media such as phone books do not chemically remove the lignin from the cellulose fibers, our gourmet papers are typically lighter and easier to tear than your average printer paper. The abnormally high lignin content of the sample we received for this week’s issue meant that our paper practically crumbled in our hands.

We looked to our President for leadership, but Nicholas just kept grabbing our faulty paper and saying “Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good,” crying as the paper crumbled through his fingers like dust.

Unimpressed by the somewhat dated reference, we attempted to call the lumber company from which we get our wood. We told the manager that we had a problem with the lignin, to which he responded, “You should be grateful for getting all that lignin. Some people pay big money for that.”

He then hung up on me.

As a result, our board was unable to procure the resources necessary to deliver today’s paper in print form. We hope that you forgive us for this understandably disappointing turn of events. From now on, we will be taking matters into our own hands. We plan to cut out the middleman by exclusively using trees grown on Hotchkiss property, which we will chop down ourselves. For all you treehuggers out there concerned about the environment, fear not: for every tree we cut down, we will put in its place a plastic Christmas tree. This replacement will also drastically reduce the risk of forest fires near our school.

Instead of a print edition, we have decided to take the only rational course of action, which is to create a website solely for this issue and then scrap it in the following weeks. Next week we expect to return to our paper-based publication.

Once again, we apologize, and we wish you all a happy Edible Books Day.