Then he would print the camera-ready copy and take it to the copy shop on Lancaster Pike and hand me the file to go away with for what I remember as several hours of laborious work.

The workflow as we now call it consisted of Rick’s putting together the Word file, with all the frustrations in those days of getting the camera-ready copy exactly right. We want to prime the pump.” Our first pump priming fascicle was ready to go on November 26th, 1990, the end of Thanksgiving weekend. We got to the point of putting together the first issue of Bryn Mawr Classical Review by rushing around to a group of our friends and saying, “Hey, have you read anything new lately? Sit down, write a review of it. We’d sell them for $0.50 apiece, something like that, and distribute them as widely and rapidly as we could to our professional colleagues. The original idea for BMCR was we would produce half a dozen of those fascicles per year. The idea made sense because Rick had founded Bryn Mawr Commentaries a decade earlier and perfected, in the world of desktop publishing, the cheap production, cheap reproduction, and cheap binding that let him sell commentaries to a book or a play of ancient literature for a buck apiece. Everyone who is here for this celebration was doomed from that moment forward to be here, whether you knew it or not. It’s important to realize that from that moment, everything else that has happened was carved immovably in the annals of fate. “Sounds like a great idea-and we can send the reviews out via e-mail.” Rick gave me a look. I think it was that emphasis on timeliness that made me respond in, as near as I can remember, exactly these words. The books sometimes aren’t even still available for sale by the time the book review appears.” It just takes way too long for book reviews to be written and get out. It needs to be timely and quick, with concise reviews. What we need is a new book review journal for Classics. So the story begins one evening in the fall of 1990 when I ran into Rick Hamilton when he was visiting my mother at Bryn Mawr Terrace nursing home, not far from where we now meet. This paper was first presented at BMCR’s 30th anniversary celebration in October 2022.

My first thirty years