Vertical Lines

When I was a young boy, I noticed in MAD Magazine that the gutters separating the two pages often contained humorous phrases. One in particular stuck with me these many years -. “If Tuesday Weld married Frederick March III, she’d be Tuesday, March the Third.” I thought that was so funny that I laughed out loud, even though I was alone at the time. I also resolved right then that if I ever published a magazine, I was going to do that, too – put funny or meaningful lines in the gutters of many of the pages.

Fast forward 100 years (or so it feels like) and I do publish a magazine – the network – and I have been putting these short one-liners (sometimes there are actually two lines) in the gutters of the magazine’s pages for a decade. We call them Vertical Lines.

It’s fun to do and it has been fun for our readers as well. They come from anywhere and everywhere – words of wisdom, insults, funny quotes, word play – just fun and interesting stuff. It was actually one of our readers who (while submitting a few lines for us to use) suggested compiling them into a book – and “Viola!” (the immortal word of Kelly Bundy on the television sitcom Married With Children), here it is!