When Lara Cochran attended her first meeting of the arts magazine at Towson High School four years ago, she heard its longtime faculty adviser tell the crowd of students what a “privilege” it would be to be chosen as a staffer.

Since then, Cochran has held every job on the masthead. She's now an editor of Colophon, the school's nationally recognized publication. And she appreciates more than ever the honor of her position.

Cochran is one of three top student editors who helped create the 50th anniversary edition of Colophon, a 260-page tomethat blends the work of generations of award-winning Towson High writers and artists with 57 selections from this year's student body.

A half-dozen core staffers seemed both tired and humbled at a recent end-of-year meeting as Cochran, 17, tried to describe what the group had learned in performing its unusual 15-month task.

“The honesty and talent of Towson High students are what really impress me, and I mean going all the way back to 1966,” she said. “This project has given us so much appreciation and perspective.”

It's a rare school lit magazine that endures for half a century, let alone establishes itself as a juggernaut in the field and maintains its quality year after year.

A small group of faculty advisers and students at Towson High have published an edition of Colophon — with little direct financial support from the school — every year since Lyndon Johnson was president.

The names, faces and contributors have changed, of course, as students graduated and teachers retired or moved on. But after spending a few early years gaining its footing, Colophon emerged as a model of exceptional quality, and has remained so to this day.

Many a “Colophonner” has gone on to pursue a career in publishing or the arts: the late-1960s faculty adviser Mary Tabor, now a novelist in Chicago; the poet Mary Jo Salter, a staffer in the 1970s; Alicia Jo Rabins of the Class of 1994, a composer and writer who completed a national reading tour last year after her first book of poetry, “Divinity School,” won a major prize from the American Poetry Review.

And as time has passed and trends and technologies changed, the publication has repeatedly won acclaim in the leading competitions of student publishing: the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the contests sponsored by the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association and the National Council of Teachers of English.

Colophon has won highest national honors from the National Council of Teachers of English in six of the last seven years, always competing against better-funded publications from bigger schools.

Tom Feigelson, an education management specialist who chairs the committee that selects winners from hundreds of submissions each year, called that achievement a rarity.

“Many schools don't remain intact for 50 years, let alone a literary magazine,” he said. “For Colophon to weather the storms of change and consistently remain one of the top 25 in the country is remarkable.”

Colophon has always been the labor of love of a relatively small group of people: students and faculty advisers willing to work long hours on their own time after school, on weekends or during vacations, usually far away from the spotlight.

“Colophonners are extremely dedicated, but they're not always the kind of people who promote themselves,” said Towson High art teacher Noah Belt, one of three faculty advisers.

One major figure in Colophon lore is Bill Jones, the English teacher who led the operation for 15 years between 1994 and 2014.

It was the longest tenure in Colophon history, a period in which Jones guided the magazine into the digital age and added a visual-arts counterpart, art teacher Linda Popp, to the team — an advantage few similar publications enjoy.

When current faculty advisor Nick Busselman, also an English teacher, was hired in 2013, it was partly because he was seen as a potential successor to Jones. “Buss,” as students call him, spent more than a year shadowing the boss and taking notes.

“I saw firsthand that this is not a typical club,” he said. “The students involved have a powerful dedication, a love for the activity. I saw how important it was

The staffers who gathered in his room for the end-of-year meeting certainly fit the description.

Anna Henderson, a junior, has been involved since her freshman year. Likewise Morgan Hylton, her classmate, and Kira Lauring, a senior.

A copy of the hardbound Golden Edition, published last week, sat on the work table between them, pristine with its white-and-maroon cover and packed with poetry, experimental fiction, photographs, illustrations and musical scores.

A visitor asked if he could pick it up.

“Have you washed your hands?” joked Henderson, and the group cracked up.

Every Colophon but one has been an anthology of works chosen from the year in question.

The magazine was born as a 30-page pamphlet, with all works in black and white; grew into a larger book, expanding to an average of 60 pages; went full color in the early 1990s, and eventually developed a tradition of including a themed title (“Mosaic,” 1993; “Pulse and Particle,” 2006; “Triptych,” 2015).

The staffers make clear it's a major task to put out a single year's edition.

The process begins during the prior school year, as advisers sort through broad ideas and choose staff. Writers and artists submit materials between September and January.

When student staffers (there were 24 this year) aren't running bake sales or selling ad space, they're engaged in the selection process, a job in which each does a blind review of all submissions, compares reactions with colleagues, and contributes to informal discussions to determine a final lineup.

The staff considered 320 submissions this year, and accepted a stingy 18 percent.

Some decisions were easy: “Evolution of a Crush,” a comic narrative by Joianna Wallace; “Blues,” a short story by Syd Miller; “Revived Decay,” a striking photo by Ariel Barbosa.

Others required more haggling, Cochran said, as the staffers felt their way to a broader theme.

The students learned Adobe InDesign, a desktop publishing software application, to lay out the pages, worked on graphics and other visual content, and selected font styles, paper and cover stock.

“We want them to be immersed in every facet of the publishing process, and to learn it together, and this group did,” Busselman said.

The call of history complicated the task this year. Everyone found it daunting to choose the best works from a 50-year span.

“It was an honor to try, but I felt it as a great responsibility,” Hylton said.

Colophonners have developed a method for choosing a theme: As they cull, dissect and compare notes over a course of months, they begin noticing motifs by which to shape a book.

For the Golden Edition, Belt said, a question suggested itself: If Colophon were a person, what would that look like?

That person would have grown up in stages like any other person, the group decided. He or she would start out young and impressionable, gain experience through discovery, rebel against authority, and finally reach a stage of self-acceptance.

It seemed to mirror the magazine's growth phases. It became an organizing principle.

Pairing new and old submissions, sometimes on the same page, the staff used patterns of content to evoke the feel of those stages over the course of the book.

The core group met for an average of six hours a day over the past four months, edtiors said. They met their deadline with the printer in mid-April.

When the first copies arrived on campus May 20, staffers rushed to open the boxes.

“There really was a lot of screaming,” Henderson said.

The staff has about 300 to sell at $20 per copy — about half the cost of producing each book. They've covered the rest with donations.

The early reviews have been positive, staffers said, as they've shown off copies around school, where not everyone is aware of the magazine's national reputation.

“Earlier this year, one of my teachers said he would buy one, but only because he knows me,” Hylton said. “When I showed him the finished product, he said, ‘Wow — I'm putting this on my coffee table!'

“Now that's a compliment.”

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jonathan.pitts@baltsun.com