When editors were gods

Happy birthday to the perennially positive Norman Vincent Peale

Today is the birthday of Norman Vincent Peale, preacher, positive thinker, bestselling author, and founder of Guideposts magazine, born in Bowersville, Ohio, on May 31, 1898. The first issue of his magazine, published in 1945, was all of four pages. The statue of Peale at right stands outside his Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan and was put there in honor of the centennial of his birth in 1998.

 

The magazine editor as Western prospector, 1904

"Every editor I know comes to his morning mail of manuscripts with the same hope with which a Western prospector starts out each morning with pick and grub-stake, in the hope of striking pay-dirt. I confess, an editor's routine would be dull, indeed, were it not for the chance of 'discovering' some writer." — Trumbull White, editor of The Red Book, in a 1904 interview.

White is speaking of an era when magazine editors depended largely on whatever writers chose to submit rather than assigning pieces to meet their own specifications. One thing that seems to have changed that model was the decline of fiction and rise of nonfiction as a major portion of magazine content. 

 

Why magazines don't have conclusion-checking departments

"In these days a magazine can afford to have its conclusions disputed, but its facts must be incontrovertible." — Everybody's Magazine, 1910.

Sounds a little something like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's much-quoted "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."

 

 

A sad ending for an editor of Commentary

Elliot Cohen, onetime editor of Commentary magazine, was found dead in his New York City apartment with a plastic bag tied over his head on this day (May 28) in 1959. "Police said the death apparently was a suicide, but investigators did not rule out the possibility he died accidentally while experimenting with the bag, perhaps for a magazine article," a UPI account of Cohen's death reported. Subsequent Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, in his 1967 memoir, "Making It," refers to it simply as a suicide.

 

John Kendrick Bangs, successful magazine editor, failed politician

Today (May 27) is the birthday of John Kendrick Bangs, editor of Harper's Weekly, literary editor of the old Life magazine, humorist, unsuccessful Congressional candidate, and pioneering fantasy writer, born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1862. Despite his many careers, Bangs lived only to age 59, dying after intestinal surgery. 

 

Curtains for Architectural Forum magazine, 1964

It was on this day (May 27) in 1964 that Time. Inc. announced it was ceasing publication of its trade title Architectural Forum and selling the magazine's spinoff, House & Home, to McGraw-Hill. Architectural Forum later found new owners and ran for another decade. Among its junior editors, starting in 1952, was Jane Jacobs, destined for later fame as an author and urban theorist.

Magazine editor Howard Cohn, 1922 to 2011

Condolences to Steven Cohn, editor-in-chief of the media trade newsletter min, on the death earlier this month of his dad, Howard Cohn, himself a longtime magazine editor. Among other roles, the elder Cohn was a writer at Collier's, editor of Pageant and True magazines, and editor-in-chief of Medical World News.  

The writer's first mistake

"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor." — Ring W. Lardner, in his book "How to Write Short Stories" (1924).

 

The magazine responsible for the 'Goldwater Rule'

A federal court jury awarded Senator Barry Goldwater $1 in compensatory damages and $75,000 in punitive damages in his libel suit against Fact magazine on this day (May 25) in 1968. The magazine had questioned Goldwater's sanity in 1964, the year he ran for president. Included in Fact's coverage was its exclusive survey of psychiatrists, in which the majority willing to offer an opinion declared Goldwater mentally unfit to serve as president. One lasting upshot of this case was the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule, which says it is unethical for psychiatrists to pass judgment on people they have not personally examined.

The editor who was also a ventriloquist

Fulton Oursler, editor of Liberty, among other magazines; author of "The Greatest Story Ever Told;" and amateur ventriloquist, died in New York City on this day (May 24) in 1952. His posthumously published autobiography is "Behold This Dreamer!" (Little, Brown, and Co., 1964).

Jack London on receiving a letter from an editor

"I could not open the letter right away. It seemed a sacred thing. It contained the written words of an editor." — Jack London, on receiving his first acceptance from a magazine. 

 

From magazine editor to chain gang

On this day (May 22), back in 1929, newspapers reported the arrest of Robert Elliott Burns, 38-year-old editor and publisher of Greater Chicago, a local business magazine. Much to the surprise of his fellow Chicagoans, who  considered him a civic leader, Burns had escaped from a Georgia chain gang in 1922 after serving several months of a six-year sentence for his role in a grocery store holdup. Returned to Georgia to finish his sentence, Burns escaped once more and, while in hiding, wrote a popular 1932 book called "I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang!"  Later that year, Burns' book was made into a movie of the same title, minus the "Georgia," which the state had objected to. Eventually pardoned by a sympathetic Georgia governor, Burns finished out his days as a tax consultant in New Jersey.