BoSacks Speaks Out: The Pocket Pal and the Gospel According to Production

Let’s be honest. If you’re under 40 and reading this, the phrase “Pocket Pal” probably sounds like a questionable app or a failed Kickstarter. But for those of us who came up in the analog trenches of magazine publishing, it was scripture. Not the kind you quote to win arguments, but the kind you dog-ear, spill coffee on, and whisper to during deadline meltdowns.

It was the mid-1970s. I was fresh, eager, and blissfully ignorant. The kind of kid who thought pagination was a type of pasta. Then one day, a salesman handed me a slim paperback that looked like it belonged in a glove compartment. It was called Pocket Pal, and it changed everything.

Published by the International Paper Company, this little book was a Trojan horse of wisdom. Small enough to fit in your briefcase, dense enough to knock out a typesetter. It covered everything: typography, ink densities, binding methods, paper weights, trimming specs, and even the alchemy behind coatings. For a rookie like me, it was less a reference guide and more a survival manual. It sat on my desk for years, stained, battered, and revered. I didn’t just read it, I consulted it like a priest with a printing fetish.

But let’s not stop there. If Pocket Pal was the Old Testament, then Jeffrey Parnau’s Handbook of Magazine Production was the New. Published under the watchful eye of Folio Magazine, it didn’t just explain production, it mapped it. I read it cover to cover, then backwards, then sideways. It was the kind of book that made you feel smarter just by holding it. Together, these two texts formed the backbone of my publishing education. They taught me that the real magic of magazines isn’t in the headlines or the cover art. It’s in the invisible scaffolding: the trim sizes, the press checks, the binding glue that holds the whole circus together.

Today, I watch the new generation tap and swipe their way through production problems. They’ve got Google, Slack, and AI that can explain dot gain in three languages. And yet, the hunger to understand, the real hunger, is still there. That’s what matters. The Pocket Pal has been updated, though I suspect Parnau’s masterpiece may have slipped into the out-of-print ether. But the lessons they taught, the reverence for craft, the joy of precision, still echo in every publisher who gives a damn about more than the cover story.

So yes, this is a love letter. Not to nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but to two little books that carried more weight than most textbooks twice their size. They were my mentors, my lifelines, and my secret weapons. If you ever flipped their pages under the hum of fluorescent lights, surrounded by deadline panic and the scent of fresh ink, then you already know.

BoSacks Bottom Line: Sometimes the smallest books carry the heaviest truths. And sometimes, they smell like varnish and victory.