Presidents' Day

Presidents' Day appears in Andy Warhol's diary as a small but telling interruption in the calendar: on Monday, February 16, 1981, he noted that it was a holiday and wryly observed that Washington and Lincoln had been put together on a Monday. The entry makes no account of a ceremony or celebration; its significance lies in the diary's attention to the plain fact of the day and in the compact joke through which Warhol registered it.

The Holiday on the Page

The dated entry begins with Warhol getting up at nine and identifying the occasion as Presidents' Day. He then reduces the holiday's historical association with two presidents to a weekday arrangement: Washington and Lincoln, joined together and placed on Monday. The observation is brief and practical rather than ceremonial. In the diary, the holiday enters not as a public event but as a marker in the ordinary sequence of a day.

A Calendar Kept by Routine

The entry belongs to a diary formed through a regular weekday practice. Beginning in the fall of 1976, Warhol and Pat Hackett spoke by phone in the morning so she could record what he had done and where he had gone, along with his cash business expenses. Their calls usually began around nine, and the supposed five-minute task could take one or two hours. Hackett took notes during the conversations, then typed the day's account while Warhol's intonations were fresh in her mind.

The diary was normally recorded Monday through Friday, not on weekends. On Mondays, Warhol recounted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday together in a triple session. Presidents' Day, falling on a Monday, is therefore recorded within the diary's working-week pattern, even though Warhol explicitly marks it as a holiday. The date shows the calendar and the recording routine coexisting: a holiday remains legible as an exception in the day, while still receiving its place in the continuing record.

From Daily Account to Published Entry

The diary began as a practical log. Before 1976, Hackett kept a sketchy Factory record of business visitors, the previous night's events, and Warhol's cash expenses. After she told him she no longer wanted to work at the office, she agreed to keep the log if the accounts came from him. The record consequently shifted from an outside summary toward Warhol's own daily narrative, while retaining its accounting purpose. He tracked even ten-cent calls from street payphones, in part because the IRS continued auditing his business after its first major audit in 1972.

The published diary is not the uncut record of those calls. Hackett reduced an original 20,000 pages, sometimes removing entire days or weeks and often selecting only part of a day's account. She also cut many names to avoid turning the book into a social column. Her editorial method aimed to preserve the flow of Warhol's voice while limiting explanatory interruptions; she removed much of their private conversational dimension and, when personal references remained, recast herself in the third person as PH. Thus the Presidents' Day note reaches readers as one concise, dated observation within a much larger record, shaped by both Warhol's spoken account and Hackett's selection for publication.