"Magazine editing is a form of creation just as much as painting a picture or writing a novel…. I want to stay in the magazine business the rest of my life." — Larry Sanders, features editor of Mechanix Illustrated, quoted in a 1958 Writer's Digest article.
Alas, it was not to be. In 1970 Lawrence Sanders published a best-selling crime thriller, "The Anderson Tapes," leading him to switch forms of creation. The novel, the first of many by Sanders, was also made into a 1971 Sean Connery movie.
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"Magazines have come and gone this century, hundreds of them. The same is true of automobiles — hundreds have come and gone. The subject of magazine foldings has been a popular one in various quarters this past decade, and though the magazine industry is often harassed and embarrassed by it, I for one am not, because I believe fervently that no industry progresses unless certain of its elements disappear along the way and others — more dynamic, more interesting and purposeful — move in to take their place. When magazines do stop folding, our industry will indeed be depressed; not because all of the magazines don't live but because some of them do." — Herbert Mayes, editor of McCall's, in a Daedalus article based on an April 1963 speech to the Chicago Headline Club.
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"There is a menace in the magazines. The magazine habit may become as bad as the morphine habit. Mere desultory reading of magazines may result in a loss of the power to select good reading and to think about it intelligently.... Careless reading of the magazines will make us as a nation more hysterical than ever before, and worse than the French..." — Frank Chapin Bray, editor of the Chautauquan magazine, in a 1909 address.
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"Everybody abuses editors. That is one of the American privileges. Editors expect it more or less. Some of them thrive on it. To be told that they want names, not stories, is like throwing cabbage at an actor. It has been done so much before that there isn't much fun in it. Why doesn't somebody invent a new and interesting abuse for editors? No doubt they are entitled to it." — Life magazine (in the pre-Luce days, when it was still a humor title), 1915.
For context, the writer is referring to the accusation that magazines prefer famous contributors to worthy material, an accusation that lives on (and not always without merit) to this day.
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"Editor and author stand in a buyer-seller relationship, and you may insist that because the editor has the power to be arbitrary and inconsiderate, he has also the right. On the other hand, it is virtually an axiom in business that it is not the most difficult client who gets the best service. Perhaps some of you editors are missing a bet. After all, yours is a business." — "Rufus M. Jones," writing on "What's Wrong With Editors?" in the Saturday Review, February 22, 1941.
An editor's note in the magazine's March 8, 1941 issue observed that the author's name was actually Rufus H. Jones, adding that he was "off to a running start should he decide to do a follow-up article on the same subject."
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"The only piece of advice I ever got from William Shawn was something he said to me in 1956, in my very first week as an editor at the magazine. 'It's no great trick,' he said, 'to edit a piece of fiction and turn it into the greatest story ever written. Anyone can do that. It's much harder to take a story and help that writer turn it into the best thing he is capable of this week or this month.' I've tried to keep that in mind. What you hope for is that the writer will sense how this process works, and will learn to trust it." — Roger Angell, longtime editor at The New Yorker, in his 2006 memoir, "Let Me Finish."
Ever the editor, he offers a somewhat different version of Shawn's quote in his 2015 memoir, "This Old Man."
Angell died yesterday at age 101.
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"…the editor must have a more sensitive and impulsive reaction to each and every little thing than anyone else. If you feel, he feels 10 times as much. If you hurt, he hurts 100 times as much. If your eyes moisten, he is bathed in tears. This is figurative, of course, but it is the editor’s acute awareness that makes him struggle to make each word, and each paragraph and each spot on a page a fraction better than it otherwise would be." — Aron M. Mathieu, writing in Writer's Digest magazine, 1957.
Mathieu was at that time the business manager of Writer's Digest. His 1996 Cincinnati Enquirer obituary says he was a former editor of Modern Photography magazine, previously known as Minicam Photography. He also seems to have been a very astute photograph collector, judging by this 2021 auction description.
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Sixty years ago today (May 7, 1962), the Pulitzer Prize advisory board announced that the organization would not add a new awards category for magazines, according to a United Press International account. The group said it believed that "the magazine field is adequately represented by its own prizes." The decision came in response to a request from the Society of Magazine Writers, now known as the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Undeterred by rejection, a useful trait for magazine writers then and now, the society made another plea in December of that year, with a petition signed by 40 editors and 18 Pulitzer Prize winners. Again, it seems to have been rebuffed.
The Pulitzer board has since rethought the matter, opening two of its journalism categories to magazines in 2015 and the rest of them the following year. This year's finalists and winners will be announced on May 9.
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In its July 27, 1971 issue, William F. Buckley's National Review published what its cover billed as "The Secret Papers They Didn’t Publish." Inside, the magazine offered 14 pages of supposedly "top-secret memoranda" regarding the Vietnam War, dating back to 1963. From all appearances the documents were as newsworthy as the Pentagon Papers, published a month earlier, and many major news outlets treated them accordingly.
They'd soon regret it.
A day after the news became public, Buckley called a press conference to confess that it was all a hoax, that the papers had been concocted in the magazine's offices, and that he never expected them to be taken so seriously.
Buckley said a purpose of the hoax had been to demonstrate that "forged documents would be widely accepted as genuine, provided their content was inherently plausible." He also used the occasion to attack the New York Times, which had been first to publish the leaked Pentagon Papers and fought for its right to do so in the Supreme Court. The Times, Buckley said, "has instructed us that it is permissible to traffic in stolen documents" but not on "whether it is permissible to traffic in forged documents."
Time magazine, for one, wasn't buying it. "None of these remarks furnished any sensible explanation of what Buckley was trying to prove," it wrote. "The National Review, with a 111,425 circulation and chronically losing money, has long been useful as a generally urbane and articulate exponent of conservative views, a field in which it has all too little competition. But its reputation will hardly be enhanced by last week's strange exercise, which in the end looked like little more than an elaborate schoolboy prank."
For his part, Buckley was willing to concede one point: "We admit we proceeded in something of an ethical vacuum."
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Not every magazine hoax has been perpetrated on or around April 1. Forbes FYI, a quarterly lifestyle supplement to Forbes magazine, chose November 1991 to inform readers that the cash-strapped Soviet Union planned to auction off the preserved remains of Vladimir Lenin. Minimum bid: $15 million.
The Soviet Interior Ministry denounced the report as "an impudent lie."
Apparently the hoax fooled several major news organizations, including ABC News, PBS, and USA Today. ABC anchor Peter Jennings seems not to have been amused, telling viewers after Forbes FYI's editor, Christopher Buckley, revealed the hoax, "I'll be encouraged in the future if Forbes FYI knows the difference between April Fool’s Day and November 3."
Magazine hoaxes seem to be something of a Buckley family tradition, incidentally. We'll look at one by Christopher Buckley's father, William F., 20 years earlier, in a future installment.
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Discover magazine's April 1995 hoax might not have fooled every reader, but it probably gave a lot of them nightmares.
In a brief story, the magazine described the recent discovery of a new life form in Antarctica. The hotheaded naked ice borer was a "hairless, pink, mole-like creature," about six inches in length, with "sharp incisors" and a "bony plate on their forehead." Its unusually high body temperature, radiating from that bony plate, allowed it to quickly tunnel through the ice and sneak up on unsuspecting penguins from below. After a pack of these charming creatures finished off a penguin, "webbed feet, a beak and some feathers" would be all that remained. They may also have been involved in the mysterious disappearance of a 19th century polar explorer, but that was purely speculation.
Despite ample clues to its inauthenticity, the hoax seems to have taken in more than a few newspapers and TV stations.
In a generous 2010 tribute on the National Geographic website, writer Carl Zimmer called it "arguably the finest science-themed April Fool's joke of all time."
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Magazines' websites have become a convenient venue for hoaxes in recent years, not always with the happiest of results. For example, in what must have seemed like an inspired idea at first, Car and Driver posted a prank item on April 1, 2009 claiming that the Obama administration had insisted Chevrolet and Dodge end their participation in NASCAR. At the time, you may recall, the government was spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the U.S. auto industry, so the story had at least a thin veneer of plausibility.
While some people seem to have enjoyed the joke, it appears to have caused considerable upset in NASCAR circles. Car and Driver pulled the piece and reportedly apologized for “going too far.”
Driver Tony Stewart got the last word in many reports on the hoax, saying, "When you’re dealing with a nation that is going through tough economic times and you have major manufacturers and millions of people [who] are relying on them and you see that happen…. I'm even smart enough not to do that, and I do a lot of stupid stuff."
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