Some of you may remember that, before the virus closed down campus for a semester and a half, I was working on a thesis concerning the founding and development of the late Great Northern Paper Company, the industrial concern that more or less built my hometown and ran it for much of my life, before coming to the end of its own in 2002 (and again, for the last time, in 2014). This project had to be abandoned when the COVID lockdown midway through the spring semester of 2020 cut me off from the Special Collections department at the University of Maine's Raymond H. Fogler Library, where most of GNP's records from the 1890s to 1992 are kept.

For my final project this semester, I decided to see whether I could salvage any of the research I did for my abandoned thesis, and furthermore, to step away from my usual academic zone and undertake one of the alternatives to a traditional term paper.

The result was a little thing I decided to call The Northern Atlas: Being a Geographical Overview of the Woodlands and Waterways that Shaped the Great Northern Paper Company, because I do like a 19th-century-style title, me.

The atlas is designed in spreads, so that if printed like a book, the description of each plate would be on the verso side and the plate itself on the recto side of each spread, but I decided not to impose the PDF version as it would have to be for printing, because that would make it hard to see on any mortal computer display (and would require 34-inch-wide paper if printed to scale), so in this file it appears one page at a time unless Acrobat's view settings are tweaked. Also, the printer's markings (bleed and crop lines, color swatches, etc.) are just there for a bit of fun.

With this course completed, I think I've finished everything required for my MA apart from whatever replaces the traditional thesis defense--some sort of meeting with my committee, I think, which we may not be able to arrange before spring since everyone's quite busy. I haven't heard from my advisor about that part yet, so I don't know precisely when all the paperwork will be finished or where to next. I'm thinking I'll carry straight on into the Ph.D program if they'll let me (some universities don't like to award MA and Ph.D degrees to the same person), because what the hell, I'm already in more debt than I'll ever pay back, and I'm not getting any younger or healthier, but I have yet to find out for certain that that's really an option.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

This might be more than a little late, and it might have no relation to what you’re planning anyway, but you might want to read this.

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/

Second, hey, being able to call yourself "Dr. Gryphon" now and then is pretty fun.