When editors were gods

The day two teen mags crashed the L.A. phone lines

It was on this day (November 15) in 1967 that more than 10,000 readers of the teen magazines Dig and Fifteen clogged the phone lines in Los Angeles so badly that incoming long-distance service was cut off to some 7 million residents for nearly two hours.

The magazines had invited readers to call their offices collect for a chance to speak with Mark Lindsay, the teen heartthrob lead singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders. According to an Associated Press account, “calls came from Australia, Tokyo, London and all parts in the United States,” and “Lindsay spoke with 300 of the callers.”

The editor as flower arranger, 1889

“True, he has sent in to him choicest flowers from many fields, but his is the hand that bunches them together and arranges them so deftly that men and women may each view the bouquet from their respective standpoints and pronounce it perfect. More than this, his skill is in almost every instance used in pruning the stray sprigs that may not harmonize, or that are decayed and barren looking.”  — The New York Press, 1889.

Nora Ephron’s surefire cover-story formula

“RULE ONE: Find a subject too much has already been written about…

“RULE TWO: Exaggerate the significance of the cover subject.”

— Nora Ephron in her 1975 essay “How to Write a Newsmagazine Cover Story,” reprinted in her 1978 collection, “Scribble Scribble.” She goes on to list five rules in all.

Though best known today as a film director, screenwriter, and author of books, Ephron (1941 to 2012) also worked at several magazines, including Newsweek and Esquire. 

 

More cutting remarks on editors, 1882

“It is a generally conceded fact that a magazine editor, male or female, is only eligible for that position when he or she is unfit for any other walk in literary life. It can be understood, therefore, how the works of people competent to write must suffer from their critical offices; how their feeble hands must revel in the task of dissecting the backbone out of a subject and reducing it to their own vapid level.” — The New York Truth, 1882.

Cutting remarks on editors, from author Rita Mae Brown

“I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have been well edited by magazine editors. Usually, they go through your article with a machete.” — Novelist Rita Mae Brown, in her lively 1988 book, “Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual.”

However, she does go on to say, “If you do find a good editor, try to work with him/her again, because you can learn something. A good magazine editor shows you how to compress your expression. This way you get more punch. It’s a valuable technique to learn.”

Why editors run critical letters

“The editors of magazines who run these Letters Sections are not completely without the ability to get nauseated by what they are doing. They prove this by dropping an unfavorable letter every once in a while into these acres of praise. This, I presume, is to show that even magazine editors are human and do not shoot par all the time.” — Henry McLemore, in a 1951 newspaper column.

From cradle to editor

“[N]obody looks at a child in the cradle and says, ‘That boy is going to grow up to be a magazine editor someday.’ It always happens accidentally. You more or less drift into it, or find your way into it through accident or circumstance.” — Robert Stein, interviewed by Roy Newquist in the latter’s 1967 collection, “Conversations.”

Stein, who died in 2014 at age 90, was one of the last survivors of the generation of men who edited major women’s magazines — in his case, Redbook from 1958 to 1965 and McCall’s from 1965 to 1967 and 1972 to 1986.

Yes, it’s another editor joke, 1897

"A Kansas poet named Casebeer took some verses to a temperance paper at Topeka. He left the presence of the grim-faced editor a sadder Budweiser man.” — a joke that apparently originated in the Denver Post, quoted in the Minneapolis Tribune, 1897.

“Sadder Budweiser man” jokes seem to be a genre unto themselves. At last count, the website Newspapers.com had 119 examples, stretching all the way from 1879 to 2003.

Teddy Roosevelt gets a new bully pulpit

It was on this day (November 7) in 1908 that The Outlook, a well-known weekly magazine, announced that Theodore Roosevelt, outgoing president of the United States, would be joining its editorial staff on or after March 5, 1909.

The announcement noted that Roosevelt would be a “special contributing editor” with an office at the magazine, but that “editorial control of The Outlook will remain unchanged.” It called his new position “somewhat analogous to that of a consulting engineer who is called in to give the benefit of his expert co-operation to the staff of engineers in charge of a great undertaking like the Panama Canal.”

A voracious reader and prolific author by presidential standards, Roosevelt was also an early advocate of simplified spelling.

 

Why first isn’t always best

“An editor can print a thing too early as well as too late. He will fail because his audience is not ready.” — S.S. McClure, founder and editor of McClure’s Magazine, quoted in the 1931 book “Magazine Making,” by John Bakeless.

Confessions of a born editor

“I was born to be an editor. I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn’t recognize it…. I edit people’s clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines…. I edit people’s tone of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs…. It is this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can’t make things. I can only revise what has been made. And it is this eternal revising that has given me my nervous face.” — Margaret Anderson, in her 1930 memoir “My Thirty Years’ War.”

Anderson was editor of the arts and literary magazine The Little Review, in the 1910s and ‘20s. It was notable for giving early exposure to, among many others, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

One editor’s very short list of great magazine editors

The late Herbert Mayes, the somewhat cantankerous editor of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, and other magazines, offered his list of the greatest magazine editors in a 1967 Saturday Review article. “Any list of genuinely great magazine editors would have to be short,” he wrote. “There simply haven’t been many.”

According to Mayes, the greats were: Henry Luce of Time, DeWitt and Lila Wallace of Reader’s Digest, and George Horace Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post. He included two others as “just possibly” great: Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair and H.L. Mencken of the American Mercury, for a grand total of five.

We might wonder what Norman Cousins, the celebrated editor of the Saturday Review at the time, thought when he didn’t see his own name on the list. However, Mayes allowed himself an out, writing that there were two current editors he was keeping an eye on and might eventually add.