The new narrower P-I arrived at my doorstep this morning. The new narrower Seattle Times is in the vending box outside my building.

As promimsed/threatened over the previous week, the papers are an inch narrower than they were before, as are many other papers around the country these days. (The narrower size has become the de facto standard for national full-page newspaper ads.)

I still don’t see how the narrower page saves paper. In order to fit the same amount of square-inchage of editorial and ad space, a paper would have to add pages. The smaller page size means the ratio of ink area to trim area is smaller, so more paper is unprinted-upon, not less.

No, the only way this scheme can save paper is if (1) advertisers are charged the same amount of money for less space, and (2) the news hole is similarly cramped. But those measures could be accomplished on the old page size. So the expensive retooling of massive printing presses is all for show, for telling fickle stockholders that we’re really doing something to keep those unreasonable promises of 20 percent profit margins.

And as for the excising of approximately one-eighth of the papers’ news holes, I’ve always been a brevity fan. There’s no need for any paper that’s not the NY Times to try to write like the NY Times. Heck, even the Times of London writes short-n’-sweet.

NOW LISTENING TO Music Out of Century 21, a Seattle World’s Fair tie-in LP that even I hadn’t known about until last week, when it was offered online at the out-of-print music site The Collector. (It’s since “scrolled off” from that site, alas; scroll down this link to read about the disc).

It turns out to have been the product of Atello Mineo, creator of the even more wacked-out World’s Fair disc Man in Space With Sounds, and his wife Toni. (The credited “artist” on Music Out of Century 21 is big-band conductor Vincent Lopez.) This one’s not as far-out as Man in Space (pun intended, as always). But it’s still a smash, a dozen tracks of lushy lounge sounds that snap in a beat from syrupy strings to badass brass to swooning choristers. The listening experience is only enhanced by the fact that I’m watching the Space Needle out my window whilst listening to the tuneage, in the century that evoked such high hopes way back then.