When editors were gods

One magazine editor's beautiful dream... shared by many

"When at times I read the despairing lamentations of contributors who declare that their work has been ruined by too many changes and the derisive outcries of those critics who point out that too few have been made, I sometimes have a beautiful dream of allowing one number of the magazine to go out into the world with every contributor displaying just that degree of art and skill that he has received from his Maker, untouched by the polishing-brush of the editor." — L. Frank Tooker, in his 1924 book "The Joys and Tribulations of an Editor."

Tooker was an editor with The Century, a major magazine in its day.

Magazine editor or U.S. president: Who's worth more?

"There was a time, I understand, when magazine editors were not highly paid, but today competition is so keen that the men who can build circulation can command substantial incomes. There are at least three magazine editors whose incomes are double that of the President of the United States, several others whose salaries approach that of the President." — Ray Long, editor of Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan (as today's Cosmopolitan was officially known for a number of years), quoted in 1927.

In 1927, the president’s salary was $75,000 a year. Long was reportedly the highest paid magazine editor of his day, earning as much as $180,000, the equivalent of something over $3 million now.

A Harper's writer unloads on his editor, 1890

"What do I care about your vulgar Magazine, anyhow? What inducements have I ever had to allow my work to be spoiled in it? No writers worth reading want to write for you, so long as they can obtain expression anywhere else. The few good writers you have are men to whom you must pay immense salaries. Your firm is a hundred years behind; ignorant, brutal, mean,—absurdly ignorant—INCREDIBLY ignorant of what art is, what literature is, what good taste is. But it makes money like pork-packeries and butcheries and loan-offices make money. So that even, with the certainty of having one's work spoiled, a starving author occasionally allows you to publish an outrageously mangled remnant of his work in your vapidly, beastly, vulgar Magazine." — Writer Lafcadio Hearn in an 1890 letter to Henry Mills Alden, longtime editor of Harper’s magazine, sometimes referred to as the "dean of American magazine editors."

Hearn seems to have been upset over the terms of a recent contract he he'd recently received.  

The magazine editor as grocer

“A magazine editor must be an expert, too; he must be a good judge of what people like to read about, a good judge of human nature. He is a middleman, like a grocer.” — Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism, in a 1930 speech. Bleyer seems to have been known around campus as “Daddy.”

The magazine editor as czar

“He was cast in the mold of all the great magazine editors: he was the czar, the man who made all the decisions, and the magazine was to be whatever he made it.”
— Journalism historian John Tebbel writing about John Brisben Walker, onetime editor and owner of Cosmopolitan magazine.

A pensive John Brisben Walker. (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

F. Scott Fitzgerald telegraphs his frustration with editors

"I GUESS THERE ARE NO GREAT MAGAZINE EDITORS LEFT." — F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1939 telegram to his (book) editor Maxwell Perkins. Fitzgerald was frustrated that Collier's magazine was wavering on whether to buy serial rights to his novel in progress, "The Last Tycoon."

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Fitzgerald's longtime benefactor George Horace Lorimer of The Saturday Evening Post had died two years earlier.

The telegram is quoted in Arthur Mizener's 1951 biography of Fitzgerald, "The Far Side of Paradise."

The magazine editor who invented a superhero

William L. Parker, editor of Mechanix Illustrated magazine and others before that, took some time off from his magazine career in 1939 to invent the comic book superhero Captain Marvel.

The best editor, if he said so himself

"I thought he was the best magazine editor of his day, and so did he." — David Brown, writing about Herbert Mayes, the famously autocratic editor of McCall's and other magazines.

Brown, a magazine editor himself before he became a movie producer, was the husband of Helen Gurley Brown, probably the most successful magazine editor of her own day.

Tame cats need not apply

"Long experience has proved in the magazine field that editorial freedom is essential to the maintenance of reader interest. If a magazine is edited by tame cats, it won't be interesting to readers. If readers are not excited by it, the publisher has little to sell the advertisers. To be useful to advertisers a magazine must be in fact free to serve readers." — William L. Chenery, editor of Collier's magazine, in a 1934 speech. 

The magazine historian Frank Luther Mott writes that Chenery presided over one of the "great eras" in the weekly's 68-year run, during which Collier's attained "an important position in American affairs and in the history of our magazines." Its 1957 demise, Mott added, was "the result of more than a decade of management which was consistent only in its ineptitude."

 

Harry S. Truman on the duty of editors

"It’s a very great responsibility to be the editor of a great newspaper or a great periodical and we have some wonderfully great magazines and newspapers in this country. It's the duty of editors of these great publications to see that the news is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and these great ones do just that. But we do have among us some publications who do not care very much for the truth in the news and sometimes make propaganda out of it, and then write editorials about it…. I hope that if any of you become editors of great publications, and you are now editors of great publications in your sphere, that you would stick strictly to the truth and nothing but the truth when you publish the news." — President Harry S. Truman in a speech to the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, an organization of student journalists and their faculty advisers, March 1952.

He likened magazine editing to writing a novel, then turned novelist himself

"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.

 

When magazines die: Looking on the bright side

"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.