When editors were gods

Magazines with only right-hand pages?

In 1935, David Smart, one of the founders of Esquire magazine, reportedly solved the age-old problem that advertisers almost always want right-hand pages. According to a contemporary newspaper account, Smart would produce magazines with only right-hand pages. "He will do it by printing every left-hand page upside down," the article explained. "It isn't clear whether the reader will be expected to turn the magazine upside down with every page, or read all the pages on the right straight through and then up-end the magazine and read straight back to the beginning." 

Does anybody know if Esquire, or any other magazine, ever attempted this?

The "child prodigy" editor

Dexter Masters, who became editor of the advertising trade magazine Tide at age 22, making him "something of a child prodigy among American editors," as his New York Times obit put it, died on this day (January 5) in 1989. Masters, a nephew of the poet Edgar Lee Masters, was also an early editor of Consumer Reports as well as a novelist. 

Aid to digestion: Advice from a former RD editor

"Grit your teeth and cut the frills." — former Reader's Digest editor in chief Edward T. Thompson, offering advice on "How to Write Clearly," in an ad for the International Paper Company, circa 1980. 

A bad day for editors (but a good one for Western Union), 1956

It was on this day (December 14) in 1956 that two venerated magazines, Collier's and Woman's Home Companion, were killed at the same board meeting. Though each title had a circulation of more than 4 million, both were said to be unprofitable. Editorial staffers were reportedly notified that they'd lost their jobs by telegram.

Update: A trademark application to bring back the Collier's name was auctioned off last week for $2,000, according to a piece by advertising columnist Stuart Elliott in The New York Times.  

Collier's magazine: Coming back from the grave after 54 years?

The name of the once-mighty magazine Collier's was auctioned off yesterday for $2,000, according to a piece by Stuart Elliott in today's New York Times. (Technically, what the buyer got, according to Elliott, is a trademark application to use the name.)  Collier's ceased publication in 1956.

Quote

“My office door was always open to the magazine’s [ad] salesmen provided they came in on their knees.” — Herbert R. Mayes, famed editor of McCall's in his 1980 memoir, “The Magazine Maze.”

PS: There's a very smart piece in the April 19 New Yorker about the rivalry between that magazine's founder, Harold Ross, and Time-Fortune-Life-etc.'s Henry Luce, by the historian Jill Lepore.