When editors were gods

On this day...

... in 1889, DeWitt Wallace, founder and initial editor of The Reader's Digest, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Wallace died in 1981, at age 91. 

On this day...

... in 1836, Henry Mills Alden was born in Vermont. Alden, a Mayflower descendant who edited Harper's for half a century, was known in his day as the "dean of American magazine editors." He died in 1919.

On this day...

...in 1906, Mark Twain, speaking at a dinner honoring the 70th birthday of longtime Harper’s Monthly editor Henry Mills Alden, observed, “How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed the publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.”

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"The future is not something you acquiesce to, it's something you create." — Andy Hunter, editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, a new, multiple-format literary quarterly, quoted in The New York Times on October 28.

On this day...

... in 1932, science and science fiction writer and editor Ben Bova was born in Philadelphia. Among other posts, Bova served as editor of Analog magazine and editorial director of Omni. A 2000 magazine interview with Bova by the editor of this site is archived here, thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

On this day...

... in 1914, The New Republic published its first issue. According to this account it sold 875 copies. 

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"The first essential for good writing is clear thinking. If you do not know what you want to say, the chances are strongly against your saying it." — John Brisben Walker, editor of Cosmopolitan, 1899.

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"An article, intended for magazine publication, that is likely to offend any man, woman, or child, should be discarded without a moment's consideration." — Perriton Maxwell, editor of the Metropolitan Magazine, 1904.

On this day...

... in 1982, Muppet Magazine was launched, under the leadership of "Frog-in-Chief" Kermit the you-know-what.  

On this day...

... in 1887, Nat Fleischer was born in New York. Fleischer founded The Ring magazine, known as the "Bible of Boxing," in 1922 and edited it until his death in 1972.

Also on this day, in 1936, Wilfred J. Funk, editor-in-chief of the Literary Digest, then a major U.S. magazine, found he had some explaining to do. His magazine's poll of some 10 million Americans had predicted that Kansas Governor Alf Landon would handily win the presidential election over incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the very opposite happened.

The fatal flaw in the poll was that it oversampled affluent voters and underestimated those without telephones, cars, or subscriptions to the Literary Digest.

Reached at the home of friends the day after the election, Funk told a reporter that, "It's beyond comprehension to explain away the Digest poll. I couldn't possibly do that now. That will take time and a lot of pencils..."

The Literary Digest ended its almost half-century run in 1938.

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"It is easy without any real knowledge of the subject to picture the magazine editor as a kind of Cerberus to frighten away the literary aspirant, and as having a special spleen against genius." — Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper's Magazine, 1907. Alden was sometimes referred to as the "dean of American magazine editors."

On this day...

... in 1942, Negro Digest published its first issue. Founder John H. Johnson had mortgaged his mother's new furniture for $500 to afford postage stamps for the direct-mail campaign. Johnson also chose November 1 as the launch date, in 1945, for his magazine Ebony.