When editors were gods

On this day...

... in 1948, Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy magazine, was born in Boston.

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"Never save a feature. Always work for the next number. Forget the others. Spend everything on just that." — Walter Hines Page, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, as recalled by one of his successors, Ellery Sedgwick.

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"I never have a meeting and never attend a meeting and wouldn't know what to do with a meeting." — Diana Vreeland, editor in chief of Vogue, in her 1984 memoir "D.V." 

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"All authors wish that they were editors." — H.L. Mencken, co-editor, with George Jean Nathan, of The Smart Set, 1921.

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"[A] really great editor is unconsciously the circulation manager of his magazine." — An anonymous but apparently prominent magazine editor, writing in The Bookman, 1915.

On this day...

... in 1880, Bertie Charles Forbes, better known as B.C., was born in Scotland. Forbes founded his namesake business and finance magazine in 1917.

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"Editors are hated more than any other men on earth." — Edgar Watson Howe, editor of E.W. Howe's Monthly.

On this day...

... in 1911, newspapers reported the suicide the previous evening of Dr. W.R.C. Latson, editor of Health Culture magazine. Latson apparently shot himself in the head at his office on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. He left behind a note saying, "I have done my best — death."

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"Don't overedit. By so doing you will estrange your writers and rob the magazine of its indispensable variety." — Ellery Sedgwick, longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

On this day...

... in 1973, newspapers reported the debut of Ebony Jr! , said to be the "first national all-black children's magazine."  The magazine, aimed at kids from 6 to 12, reached a circulation of 100,000, but had slumped to 40,000 when owner John H. Johnson decided to fold it.

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"Stability, Sincerity, and Service" — motto of Woman's Home Companion, a magazine published from 1874 to 1957. Its best-known editor was Gertrude Battles Lane, who ran the magazine for 30 years, starting in 1911. 

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"[E]ditors, alas, usually listen to applause off stage." — Lenore Hershey, editor-in-chief of the Ladies' Home Journal, in her foreword to the anthology "The Journal of a Century," 1976.