[A] half-century ago in the age before personal computers and cellphones, Vermont Life magazine, facing a budget deficit, hit upon the next best thing to printing cash: Printing calendars.
The idea was simple: Publish postcard pictures beside date boxes big enough to pencil in when and where you’re supposed to be.
It was also successful, spawning annual sales as high as 100,000 copies or more. But with this summer’s shuttering of the state-run parent magazine, the calendar tradition is set to come to an end.
“They’re the last ones,” Commissioner of Tourism and Marketing Wendy Knight confirms of the 2019 collection now in stores.
The state had considered selling the magazine and related businesses, only to end everything this year after giving up hope of recouping $3.5 million in debt.
“The calendar was a big income source,” Vermont Life editor emeritus Tom Slayton says, “but it declined in sales because other people started making them and there became more and more free ones.”
Vermont Life once sold more than 100,000 wall calendars annually. But even after diversifying into pocket calendars, desk calendars, weekly planner calendars, weather calendars and printmaker Sabra Field and Fish & Wildlife Department calendars, the state will distribute only 13,000 in total this year.
And so six months after the final issue of the magazine, the last calendars are on sale as the state plans to redirect vermontlife.com traffic to its sister site, www.vermontvacation.com.
The news is disconcerting to stores such as Everyone’s Books in Brattleboro, which carries dozens of calendars ranging from astronomy to zoology but reports Vermont Life’s collection outsells all.
“We sell hundreds and hundreds,” co-owner Nancy Braus says. “It’s all going goodbye.”
Then again, Braus is saying hello to distributing her own “We Are Vermont!” calendar as a fundraiser for the anti-climate change group 350Vermont. Unlike Vermont Life’s uninhabited landscapes, it pictures Vermonters themselves.
“Year upon year we have looked at everything available — churches and covered bridges and colored leaves — and thought, ‘None of these have people,’” the bookseller says.
Braus isn’t the only one venturing into the business. Sabra Field is working to independently continue her calendar (and Vermont Life note cards) through her website starting next year.
“We’ve been getting lots of inquiries from wholesalers and individuals,” studio manager Jeanne Amato says, “so we thought we should do it.”
The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department has a similar plan to distribute its calendar in its offices and online.
“It’s been such a great tradition,” spokeswoman Susan Warner says, “and a really nice way to showcase local wildlife photographers.”
Vermont Life, for its part, has partnered with Middlebury College to post its past magazines in an internet archive.
“The state still owns the Vermont Life brand,” Knight says, “but there is no focus on reinventing or reimagining it at this point.”
As for future calendars? Slayton fears they’ve had their day.
“It’s a declining market, the pie is getting smaller and more people are cutting pieces out of it,” he says. “I buy them because I’m a relic of the past, but I keep my calendar on my computer now.”