by Michael Angerer

The very first issue of The Poor Print was published in Trinity term 2013. To celebrate our tenth birthday, we’ve asked past Poor Printers
to provide retrospective editorials on their time with the newspaper. Here, Michael Angerer reflects on his time as an executive editor from 2017 to 2019.

Ten years of The Poor Print is a long time. I only joined The Poor Print five years ago, and somehow that seems even longer. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s important for The Poor Print to continue over the years – for reasons that may not always be entirely obvious. Not that some grand ambition to perpetuate Poor Printing was what led me to get involved, one misty Michaelmas term in 2017. As for many others, it started out as an expedient and entertaining outlet for the pretentious prose that is such a frequent side effect of adjusting to Oxford student life (i.e., becoming the opposite of well-adjusted). Regular submissions were followed by friendly editorial meetings at Café Nero, led by Joanna, Chris, and Tom. Before long, I was hooked. As for many others, pretentious prose proved to be the start of a slippery slope. And the importance of The Poor Print is something I gradually discovered along the way.

Behind the scenes, The Poor Print is a lot more complex than it seems, as I soon found out when I took over as editor together with Fanxi and Chloe in 2018. You wouldn’t think a college newspaper produced with college funds and college materials would need much of a budget. You’d be wrong. We were lucky to benefit from Joanna’s mathematical expertise and shrewd management: constant vigilance was necessary to stop college from overcharging itself for printing. But I have surprisingly fond memories of sitting up for layout until long past midnight, with a half-finished essay on the French realist novel hanging over my head. Every now and again, we would fall short of the number of submissions needed to make up a full print issue; some of my more inspired writing happened in the twenty minutes before printing to fill that crucial final corner. Thus began the column ‘A Word from the Editors’, which at the time doubled as an excuse for me to indulge in a bit of early-morning etymology. All this to rush to print in time for Sunday brunch; all this for the incomparable gratification of hearing brunchers compliment us on the new issue.

We did occasionally intervene in the more obviously ‘important’ college issues, including the Great Drinking Society Controversy of 2019. Printing an anonymous article that (rather mildly, I thought) called into question the place of secret drinking societies in College certainly kept us relevant by ruffling an inordinate amount of feathers. Far too many people told me we had acted wrongly in preserving the author’s anonymity. The irony of dealing with all of the fallout from secret societies, while their members and aspirational members assured me there was no reason to protect the author’s identity, was not lost on me. This is, incidentally, when we were instructed to change our website to read ‘Oriel College Student Newspaper’, rather than ‘Oriel College Newspaper’ – lest anyone should think The Poor Print is officially endorsed. At no point was I more grateful for the backing of the Junior Deans, who scrutinize every issue before publication, and the support of all those who had recently joined The Poor Print, thanks to whom it was still fun to run the paper, rather than just tedious.

But here, I have to contradict Monim’s assessment of The Poor Print’s importance in his article earlier this term – for all that he has been a much more successful and long-standing editor after succeeding us, together with Saman and Martin, in 2019. If anything can be said about the importance of The Poor Print, it lies just as much in the small and weird contributions – the philosophical explorations that straddle the line between commentary and fiction, the delicate and delightful sonnets, the quirky cartoons and the unhinged puzzles, all from strange and wonderfully unexpected places. Thanks to all our contributors, and to The Poor Print’s long line of editors, we provide a window into the hidden and not-so-hidden past lives of Oriel – which, with each print copy dutifully delivered to the college archives, I took pleasure in preserving for posterity. In our own small way, this is our unofficial supplement to the official Oriel College Record. And let me use this opportunity to set the record straight: Beary McBearface’s purple companion in the JCR is correctly known not as John Henry, but as Ozymandias, King of Kings. He was sewn by my set-mate’s father, for reasons that shall forever remain mysterious.