When editors were gods

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"A great magazine is a sort of net for ability, and its editor can take his pick of the world for his friends if he has also the human sympathy which is the gift of gifts." — Candace Wheeler, famous interior designer, in her memoir "Yesterdays in a Busy Life" (1918).

On this day...

... in 1937, Norman Hapgood, the crusading editor of Collier's magazine and Harper's Weekly, and briefly U.S. envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Denmark, died following an operation. He was 69.

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"The 'new' editor, in fact, is little more than a clerk doing the bidding of his proprietor, and the proprietor's idea of editing is slavishly to truckle to the public taste — or rather to his crude conception of the public taste." — Bruno's Weekly, edited by Guido Bruno "in his garret in Washington Square," 1916.

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"My definition of an editor is a ghost writer or a ghost thinker." — Max Ascoli, editor of The Reporter magazine, 1968.

On this day...

... in 1938, Roy E. Larson, publisher of Life magazine, was acquitted in a Bronx, New York, court of the charge of selling obscene and indecent literature and photographs. The case involved a Life article on the birth of a baby.

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"Now out of nine thousand manuscripts a year The Century can only possibly print four hundred or less. It follows that editing a magazine is not unlike walking into a garden of flowers and gathering a single bouquet. In other words, not to accept an article, a story, a poem is not necessarily to 'reject' it. There may be weeds in the garden...but the fact that a particular blossom is not gathered into the monthly bouquet does not prove that the editor regarded the blossom as a weed, and therefore passed it by." — The Century Magazine, 1890.

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"Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack." — Raymond Chandler, on writing for detective magazines.

On this day...

... in 1938, newspapers reported that Charles Weiss, editor of anti-Nazi magazine Uncle Sam, published in Brooklyn, N.Y., had been attacked by four alleged Nazis the previous Friday evening. The alleged Nazis had allegedly beaten and stripped the editor and painted black swastikas on his body after he refused to kiss a Nazi flag.

On this day...

... in 1954, newspapers reported on a Senate subcommittee hearing held a day earlier to examine whether violent comic books were responsible for juvenile crime. Publisher William M. Gaines defended a cover drawing on one of his comics, depicting a man with an ax holding a woman's severed head. Asked whether he considered the cover to be in good taste, Gaines testified that he did, adding that showing the woman's neck dripping blood would have been in bad taste. Gaines next found himself defending a drawing of a man choking a woman to death with a crowbar. That fall, Gaines gave up on horror titles and began to focus on a little humor comic called Mad that his company had launched two years earlier. Mad was transformed into a slick magazine in the summer of 1955, in part to put it out of reach of the repressive Comics Code that the industry had adopted after the Senate hearings.

On this day...

... in 1999, Elizabeth Tilberis, editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar, died at age 51. Her memoir "No Time to Die," published the year before, tells of her battle with ovarian cancer, which ultimately killed her. 

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"Editors are middle-men. They buy what they can sell. One editor can sell one kind of story; another, another, and so according to clientele." — Frederic E. Manson, editor  of Grit, 1918.

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"Love work for the sake of your work, and not for the reward there is in it; and regard something difficult as only something to be overcome." — Edward W. Bok, longtime editor of The Ladies' Home Journal, quoted in the book "Successful Men of Today—and What They Say of Success," 1905.