Justin Skolnick lives and works in Chicago.

The Castle Literary Magazine

Wartburg College

1999–2002

I left prospective students’s day with a trove of recent issues of Wartburg College’s literary magazine and passed the next week’s evenings poring over them.

When I arrived on campus, the magazine’s editor recruited me to help sift through the balance of the publication’s archive for interesting bits. Among the old issues we found captivating and unreasonably discarded image: a quill pen in a crown. To celebrate the magazine’s 50 years in print, we placed the mark front and center on the cover of the anniversary issue.

In my junior year, as co-editor, I took a technical-stylistic role while my partner favored literary-editorial duties. Because prior editors had shown a weakness for novelty typefaces, sometimes using many of them at once, I pressed for a two-face limit: a serif for body copy and a modernist sans for display. In addition, we agreed to expand the format from its traditional half-letter width to half-legal, adding an inch and a half of margin to each page. The change helped the staple-bound booklets finally lay flat on the desks and coffee tables of the college community.

I entered my senior year as the magazine’s sole editor and set to immediately to work. Freed to make unilateral decisions (within the scope of my responsibilities, of course) I worked and reworked the visual style in an attempt to leave the publication looking less like a student hobby and more like something people would actually want to write for and read. If nothing else, I figured, I’d have a couple nice portfolio pieces.