When editors were gods

American Heritage's long-lived, much-married editor

On this day (June 30) in 2005, Oliver Jensen, a founder and an early editor of American Heritage magazine, died at age 91. Among his five wives was the short-story writer and novelist Jean Stafford.

 

The food magazine editor who preferred room service

William J. Garry, editor of Bon Appetit magazine, died at age 56 on this day (June 29) in 2000. According to Garry's obituaries, he and another editor, reportedly Rochelle Udell of Self magazine, were so underwhelmed by the food at one late-1990s National Magazine Awards ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria that they ordered room service (pizza and shrimp) for themselves and their tablemates.

 

Magazines that might have been: Newsleak

Forty years ago today (June 28, 1971) syndicated columnist Bob Considine facetiously proposed the launch of Newsleak, a magazine devoted to all the leaked information then emanating from Congress and the Nixon White House.

How to know if you're cut out to be an author

"If you can sit placidly, perhaps gratefully, while another slashes your copy with an editing pencil, removing words, changing sentences, and feel no deep urge to plunge the despoiler's pencil into his thorax, there is a good chance you will never be an author." — Ralph Daigh, who spent much of his career as an editor at Fawcett Publications, in his 1977 book, "Maybe You Should Write a Book."

The editor of the future, 1915

"The successful editor of the future must differ much from the type that popular conception has hitherto raised upon a pedestal. The hero of literature and affairs who considers it his mission to instruct the public in taste and morals and polity has gone forever. The schoolmaster's grave is deep. The dictator's grave is deeper." — Robert Sterling Yard, writing in 1915. Yard was an editor-in-chief of The Century Magazine and later a founder of The Wilderness Society, which calls him "protector of our national parks." 

The editor who tried to give unknown writers a fair shake

Today is the birthday of the wonderfully named Sumner Blossom, born June 25, 1892. Blossom served as editor of Popular Science Monthly and then American Magazine. At the latter he introduced a system in which fiction manuscripts were read with the author's name obscured so that famous writers and unknowns would both be judged solely on merit. Blossom died in 1977.

Happy birthday, Norman Cousins and Frank Crowninshield

Today is the birthday of Norman Cousins, author, activist, laughter advocate, and longtime editor of the Saturday Review, born on June 24, 1915.

Also born on this day, in 1872: Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair during its early 20th century glory years (1914 to 1936).

Loren Palmer, Liberty's editor and Theodore Roosevelt's pal

On this day (June 23) in 1930, Loren Palmer, editor of Liberty magazine and before that of Collier's Weekly, died in New York CIty at age 50. Palmer was also a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a onetime magazine editor. 

Things they don't tell you in journalism school, #1

 "As in most worthwhile jobs, much of editing is sheer drudgery." — Bruce and Beatrice Gould, longtime co-editors of Ladies' Home Journal, in their jointly written 1968 memoir, "American Story."

And in a related quote: “Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours.” — Success magazine founder and editor Orison Swett Marden.

 

Harold Ross: Why it's lonely at the top of the masthead

"I now go on the principle that a journalist isn't entitled to friends, or an editor, either." — New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross, in a 1941 letter to Brendan Gill, future author of the memoir "Here at the New Yorker," reprinted in "Letters From the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross," edited by Thomas Kunkel (The Modern Library, 2000).

 

When Hemingway was banned in Boston

On this day (June 20) in 1929, newspapers reported that Boston police had barred Scribner's Magazine from that city's newsstands because of a supposedly salacious excerpt from Ernest Hemingway's new novel "A Farewell to Arms." 

The magazine editor, as writers once imagined him

"I used to picture the editor in some such way as a children are supposed to picture God — a dreadfully austere personage, heavily bearded, fiery-eyed, robed like a judge. He sat at a huge desk in awful stillness, with a checkbook at his left elbow, a mail chute at his right, and a pile of shopworn manuscripts before him; and, if he pulled the checkbook toward him, he frowned and muttered; but if he used the mail chute, it was with a gay flourish and a nasty laugh...." — Kenneth Payson Kempton, a college teacher and magazine contributor, in the book "How to Write for a Living" (1937).