"An experienced editor knows that it is not necessary to eat an entire ox to taste the quality of the beef." — Success magazine, 1905.
A similar sentiment was attributed to both Walter Hines Page (Atlantic Monthly and The World's Work) and George Horace Lorimer (Saturday Evening Post). "I don't have to eat the whole egg to discover it is bad," Page or Lorimer supposedly responded to a writer who challenged whether he had read her full manuscript, certain pages of which she had glued together as a test.
The gluing of manuscript pages and related ruses seem to have been common in the late 19th and early 20th century, when magazines claimed to give a fair hearing to both known and unknown writers, but many of the latter suspected otherwise. In 1887, Lippincott's Magazine remarked that "The editor of this magazine, for his part, confesses to a wicked pleasure in humoring the contributor, and where he finds two pages glued together he carefully leaves the glue undisturbed, and where pages are placed upside down, or in the wrong numerical order he does not interfere with the disarrangement. It is not often necessary to read an entire article in order to reach an accurate estimate of its merits."
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