What follows is a personal essay. When I was invited to compose it, I looked back over “A Mirror for the Lamp,” the impressive evaluation conducted by Maynard Mack, George Winchester Stone, and others for the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of PMLA (73.5.2 [1958]: 45–71), and could not find it in my heart to mount a similar enterprise. It seemed to me that in this era of self-expression, an individual statement would be more useful. I was intimately involved with PMLA for some seventeen years, beginning in 1947, with William Parker and Donna Walsh, as junior proofreader and copyeditor, seeing to its manufacture and paying the bills from 1952 to 1955, and eventually handing over as editor to William Schaefer in 1971 (with seven years off for good behavior between 1955 and 1962). I will characterize the journal we inherited in 1947, what we thought we were accomplishing between 1950 and 1968, and what has happened since 1971. I shall try to keep my prejudices in check, but they will no doubt become evident soon enough. One advantage in proceeding in this fashion is that no one else need be held responsible for the errors of either omission or commission.