With more stores than its peers statewide, Phoenix Books prides itself on its ability to secure any publication a shopper could want.
Any publication other than a Vermont Life calendar, that is.
“People are missing it,” manager Tod Gross says of an annual staple that’s out of print for the first time in a half-century.
The state began producing the calendar — 12 months of postcard views and date boxes big enough to pencil in any appointment — in the 1960s as a way to support its longtime promotional magazine.
But the advent of personal computers and cellphones as well as a $3.5 million operating deficit led the state to shutter its publication division in 2018 and, with it, the calendar that once sold as many as 100,000 or more copies annually.
Vermont Life had diversified into pocket calendars, desk calendars, weekly planner calendars, weather calendars and printmaker Sabra Field and Fish & Wildlife Department calendars when it put all 13,000 of its final 2019 collection on sale a year ago. That number was one-tenth of its historic high. But it still was more than any other brand available in the state, leaving stores with a gaping hole to fill.
“Nobody’s happy,” Gross says at Phoenix Books, which has locations in Burlington, Essex and Rutland. “People liked that it was in a box so they could mail it to everybody anywhere. I have customers now saying, ‘What am I going to do?’”
The store has ordered a smattering of look-alikes from other publishers, although it estimates sales of all will be no more than half of last year’s Vermont Life total.
The family-owned Vermont Illustrating company in the Upper Valley figured it could cash in with a “Vermont Living” calendar and distributed hundreds to stores before Multimedia Advertising Services of St. Johnsbury announced it held the registered trademark for the “Vermont Living” name.
“We still get calls about both the old Vermont Life magazine and its calendar,” says Multimedia’s Rick DeFabio, who ultimately agreed to support Vermont Illustrating’s version.
The Vermont Country Store, for its part, has expanded its partnership with Yankee Magazine to produce the first “Our Vermont” calendar, which is slightly different in shape and size.
“We wanted ours to have its own look and feel,” says chief storekeeper Geof Brown, who notes company founder Vrest Orton was also one of the originators of Vermont Life.
The “Our Vermont” calendar has only been on sale long enough to spark one online review.
“I purchased this calendar as a replacement for the Vermont Life calendar,” that customer said. “It works.”
Even so, shopkeepers are lamenting the loss of the half-century-old tradition.
“We like having things that our customers want, and Vermont Life calendars brought people in,” Gross says at Phoenix Books. “We’re not selling nearly as many of the replacements. They’re nice, but people like what they like. They’re not the same.”
