When editors were gods

The first woman editor of a men's magazine?

In an era when women's magazines were commonly edited by men, and nobody seems to have thought twice about it, Agnes Monroe Russell bucked the trend by becoming what was believed to be the first woman to edit a magazine for men. The magazine was a monthly called The Club, about which little seems to be known.

Not much seems to have been written about Russell, either, except for passing mentions in newspapers and magazines of the day.

In a brief obituary, the newspaper trade weekly The Fourth Estate said she was "a prominent figure in literary circles, and was a leader socially among the writers. Her hobby was the Dining Club, an informal society which she organized two years ago and of which she was hostess and ruling spirit up to the time of her death. The club includes among its members men and women prominent in art, literature and newspaper work."

In an article before her death, The Peterson Magazine said she edited The Club "intelligently and gracefully" and called her "a poet and a scholar of superb talents. In appearance, she is tall, well-moulded and lithe."

A newspaper article in 1892 noted that she was "a New England girl but has all the savior faire of a Frenchwoman. She is a brilliant entertainer and her dinners and receptions are among the most charming in Bohemia." And an article a year earlier called her "one of the most attractive journalists in the field. She is an ideal hostess, a most loyal friend, and her after-dinner anecdotes and bon mots have been sent far and wide."

Russell, who generally used her maiden name (Agnes Monroe) professionally, was also a successful author and short story writer. She died on this day (March 27) in 1895, at her home in New York City.

'An almost ecclesiastical air of aloofness and grandeur'

“Before now there have been great editors and near-great editors of magazines who loved to dress the part—who in business hours were to be found enshrined in sanctums like endowed chapels, steeping their solemn souls in an atmosphere of rarified intellectual calm, surrounded by an almost ecclesiastical air of aloofness and grandeur. To reach their presence, one must filter through the sieving hands of from three to a dozen underlings—indeed, one had to know the password or a prominent advertiser to get into their outer offices at all.” — Irvin S. Cobb, writing in The Bookman, December 1918.

Context: Cobb was a popular author of the day. The quote is from an article of his on George Horace Lorimer, longtime editor of the Saturday Evening Post and a frequent buyer of Cobb’s journalistic wares.

The sorry tale of an 'ink maniac'

Harry Thurston Peck, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., L.H.D., L.L.D., was a man of letters. And letters would be his undoing.

Peck’s story, one of the saddest and strangest in the annals of magazinedom, came to a tragic end on March 23, 1914, when his body was found in a $4-a-week Stamford, Connecticut, rooming house, a revolver in his left hand, a bullet in his brain. He was 57.

Just a few years earlier, Peck had been a prominent figure on the New York literary scene. He was the founding editor of The Bookman, a popular magazine of the day, and was credited with inventing the best-seller list.

He was also a widely published literary critic, poet, and essayist, contributing to major magazines like Cosmopolitan and Munsey’s. He had a dozen books to his credit as editor or author, including entire encyclopedias. He was so prolific that he wrote under at least five pseudonyms.

On top of all that, he headed the Latin department at Columbia University.

Peck seems to have cut an especially colorful figure on campus. The scholar and author John Erskine, a student at Columbia at the time, described Peck, circa 1900, in his book “The Memory of Certain Persons”:

“He wore a tan box coat and a brown derby too small for his moon-shaped face, which was embellished by ridiculous side whiskers and mustache. He wore a flower in his lapel, his eyes protruded, the lenses of his glasses were very thick, he carried a brief case and a sporty cane…. He seemed bound for the race track, or for an appearance in a minstrel show.”

He cannot restrain himself

The first obvious sign of trouble came in September 1908, when his wife of 17 years divorced him, charging desertion. “He is an ink maniac,” she was quoted as saying. “Put a pen in his hand and he cannot restrain himself.” She added that in her opinion, literary men make “undesirable husbands.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer joked that, “Professor Harry Thurston Peck, who has been a persistent foe of the ‘new woman,’ has been divorced by his wife. He evidently couldn’t stand the old woman, either.”

The paper was referring to much talked-about articles like “The Woman of To-day and of To-morrow,” which Peck had written for Cosmopolitan in 1899. (Cosmopolitan in those days had yet to become a women’s magazine.) In the piece, he argued that the relationship between men and women had changed little since the days of the caveman and therefore stood the test of time.

Man (as opposed to woman) was the unquestioned master of the earth, he wrote. “The place of woman in this world of ours has… been marked out for her by man, and he has so marked it out for her with a perfect knowledge, in the first place, of his own necessities, and in the second place, of her nature, her endowments, and her limitations. In that place she is bound to stay because for him, and it may be added, for her as well, it is wholly best that she should do so.”

The following year, in a piece titled “The Woman of Fascination,” he described the component parts of such a woman. The ideal eyes, for example, were gray/green (never blue), the ideal nose neither too big (“fatal”) nor too small, the ideal fingers supple and pliant. When he finally got around to her mind, it was “not a powerful one. Pure intellect, as such, is seldom hers to any great extent. She is apt to be quite superficial in her general knowledge and to dislike the labor of acquisition…”

In still another article he contended that while there was no harm in allowing women a college liberal arts education, it was a mistake to admit them to graduate school, where they would only distract the male faculty and students from the serious work at hand.

Whether he truly believed all this or was just trying to be provocative, as magazine writers are sometimes wont to do, is open to discussion.

In any event, about a year after his divorce, in August 1909, Peck married a New York City high school teacher. Though he might have thought he was settling down to a period of quiet domesticity and vigorous literary output, just about every aspect of his life was about to fall apart.

Peck of trouble

In February 1910, Peck was served papers at Columbia charging him with breach of promise. The complainant, a 30-something stenographer named Esther Quinn, alleged that Peck had been seeing her for nearly a decade and had promised to marry her once he was free of his first wife. She was asking for $50,000 (about $1.3 million in today’s money).

It wasn’t until May that newspapers picked up on the story, but they quickly made up for lost time. The New York World obtained and published some of Peck’s purported love letters to his steno sweetie. Other papers, all over the country, followed suit, often on their front pages. 

One small sample:

“My darling: I thought of you so lovingly all night, and I am thinking of you in the same way now. You were beautiful and lovable. Dearest, don’t forget me. You want me to come to you again and again. I kiss your little hands and adore you. HARRY.”

Though the letters were more sappy than sexy, the famous literary critic was mortified.

All told, Quinn claimed to have more than 100 letters, which she was prepared to produce at trial. Although Peck challenged their authenticity, the embarrassment of their publication was too much for Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Despite Peck’s prominence on the faculty, and the two men’s supposed friendship, Butler insisted that he resign immediately. Peck refused, vowing to fight. Columbia’s trustees then took up the matter and dismissed Peck in October 1910.

A flurry of lawsuits followed. Peck sued Butler for slander and at least three newspapers for libel. Quinn, meanwhile, filed a libel suit against the New York Times and another one against Peck, this time for $100,000.

One of Peck’s suits was against the Boston Post, which had published his letters with snarky commentary and, he said, so damaged his reputation that he’d lost several magazine contracts. The court awarded him $2,500, although he had requested $100,000. Even so, he fared better than Quinn, whose $100,000 suit against the New York Times ended with an award to her of six cents.

Quinn’s original breach of promise suit against Peck was dismissed in 1912, but she sued him again a year later. In early 1913 Peck filed for bankruptcy protection, claiming to have a net worth of just $200. That spring, newspapers reported he was near death in an Ithaca, New York, hospital, “a hopeless mental and physical wreck.”

Enter now Mrs. Peck No. 1, who took her ex-husband home and, following the Christian Science practices in which she was a fervent believer, nursed him back to health. Mrs. Peck 2, who had separated from her husband soon after the Quinn suit became public, seems to have consented to the arrangement.

By November 1913, the New York Sun was reporting that Peck was “now working until 2 and 3 o’clock of mornings in his study at Riverside, Conn., as editor-in-chief of the revised edition of the International Encyclopedia…. Between times he is assisting in editing the Bookman, is preparing material for two or three new books, and is riding from ten to twenty miles a day on horseback about Greenwich and Cos Cob.”

But the real picture was bleaker. Two of Quinn’s lawsuits, totaling $150,000, still hung over his head. Save for The Bookman, he was persona non grata in the magazine world. His encyclopedia assignments were nearly finished, with no new offers in sight. His efforts to get Columbia to reinstate him had been to no avail.

In early March he checked into the Stamford rooming house, where lived for about two weeks before ending it all.

Learning of Peck’s suicide, Franklin P. Adams, a major New York newspaper columnist of the era, wrote that, “Newspaper publicity is a good thing oftener than not; and the fear of it undoubtedly keeps a good many of us from doing questionable things. But it is relentless. One pathetic result of it is that Professor Harry Thurston Peck is better known as a man who had uxorial troubles — although there are many such men — than as a fine, sound scholar and writer — and there are few such.”

Peck was buried in Greenwich, Connecticut, after services in nearby Stamford. Newspapers reported that the only mourners were Peck’s first wife, their daughter, and a couple of neighbors. Mrs. Peck No. 1 showed a reporter 30 or 40 letters she’d received from her ex-husband’s onetime friends. “Words, ink, a two-cent stamp,” she said. "What do they all matter? If they had only helped him a little when he was alive. It is all so cruel and hard. He didn’t deserve the treatment he received.”

 

Willa Cather on the business/editorial divide

"The business and editorial departments of 'The Outcry' were separated by a long corridor and a great contempt." — Willa Cather in her 1918 short story "Ardessa," published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. 

Cather, who describes her fictional Outcry as a "highly respectable publication" that has been transformed by a new owner into "a red-hot magazine of protest," knew her way around a real magazine office. She had edited the Pittsburgh-based Home Monthly in 1896–1897 and joined the staff of McClure's magazine in 1906, becoming its managing editor from 1908 to 1912. She also wrote the "autobiography" of her famous boss, S. S. McClure. 

 

 

 

The high priests of sacrifice

“It is no longer necessary for the editors of our magazines to be literary. All they need is the commercial instinct of the commercial traveler, the knowledge of the selling qualities of what merchandise they hawk, no matter how trumpery, how meretricious it be. No matter how good it is, it has only one qualification of acceptance — its appeal, through whatever vulgar or inartistic quality, to a sufficient number of people. Circulation is the Moloch to which is sacrificed literary talent, and the editors are the high priests of sacrifice.” — Francis Hopkinson Smith, in a 1911 newspaper interview.

Smith was a prominent author of the day, as well as an artist and engineer, whose projects included the base for the Statue of Liberty.

The continuing adventures of 'a certain magazine editor'

"It is a custom of a certain magazine editor when he comes to town to send the Bible he finds in his hotel room to some friend inscribed on a fly leaf thusly: 'With compliments of the Author.'" — columnist O.O.McIntyre, August 17, 1925. 

The person behind People?

Interesting letter in the New York Times print edition today (and online yesterday), which attributes the idea for People magazine to the recently deceased Marian Sulzberger Heiskell. The author of the letter is Landon Y. Jones, who was People's managing editor (the equivalent of editor-in-chief on Time Inc. magazines in those days) from 1989 to 1997 and the managing editor of Money magazine before that. Jones also wrote the Baby Boomer-defining classic, "Great Expectations."

Andrew Heiskell, Marian Sulzberger Heiskell's late husband and onetime chairman of Time Inc., offered a somewhat different origin story in his 1998 memoir, "Outsider, Insider," basically maintaining that the idea for People was his own. He does, however, have many nice things to say about his wife in the book, which he also dedicated to her.

Better than Renaissance arts patrons, at least

“The alleged tyranny of the modern magazine editors is but a gentle moral suasion compared with the despotism of so-called patrons of the arts and letters in earlier times. Let any one who thinks that there is too much literary log-rolling in the present day turn back to the fawning dedications of the Renaissance and the age of Queen Anne, and he will understand how far authorship has risen out of base subserviency into independence and self-respect.” — Dr. Henry Van Dyke, speaking at the first public meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, as quoted in The New York Times, February 3, 1900.

Van Dyke was a prominent poet and author, a Princeton professor, and onetime United States ambassador to the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

What might have been

“The Time-Life addition won’t be out now until early autumn. The publishing house wanted the simple name of ‘Sport’ for the title, but that has been in use for years. The guessers are now saying the new magazine will be ‘Leisure,’ ‘Score,’ or ‘Fame.’ — syndicated newspaper columnist Cedric Adams, February 17, 1954. 

Adams was partly right. Sports Illustrated made its debut on August 16, 1954.

Here are more magazine titles that might have been.

Al Silverman, 1926 – 2019

“I don’t think that editors, at any time — save maybe for Maxwell Perkins — have ever gotten their full due.” — Al Silverman, in his 2008 book, “The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors.”

Silverman, who edited Sport magazine during much of its 1960s heyday and also edited the men’s adventure magazine Saga at the same time, died last Sunday (March 10, 2019). He was 92. 

Silverman left magazine editing in 1972 at the urging of Ed Fitzgerald, a former Sport editor he described as his “life mentor,” to become editorial director of the Book-of-the-Month Club. He later served as an editor at Viking Books.

“The Time of Their Lives” touches, briefly and very modestly, on Silverman’s magazine career. He also figures in Fitzgerald’s 1985 memoir, “A Nickel an Inch.” 

Here is a charming appreciation of Sport by the essayist Joseph Epstein: “The Original Sports Magazine.”

As a sidelight, I knew Al slightly when we were both on the board of the Writers Emergency Assistance Fund of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and remember him as extraordinarily smart, funny, gracious, and generous — an editor who deserved his full due.

Debt, misery, destitution... and other encouraging words for a would-be magazine writer

“But it is impossible to live by magazine work alone, my dear boy. There is not a man in America who is doing it, or who can do it. There are not enough magazines. We all have to depend on private means, or on the salary of some regular position. Go back to the Tribune or some other newspaper. Then you will be able to pay your way, and escape temptation, the horrors of debt, and all the misery of uncertainty, yes, and of destitution. They will wreck you, take my word for it…” — Advice from Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland, editor of Scribner’s Monthly, to the writer William Henry Rideing, as recalled in the latter’s 1912 memoir, “Many Celebrities and a Few Others: A Bundle of Reminiscences.”   

Rideing seems not to have heeded Holland’s advice, but soon abandoned newspapering to pursue a career as an author, a magazine writer, and an editor at The Youth’s Companion magazine.  

A little hick goes a long way

"But it was that endless curiosity, almost a hick curiosity — our best editors have always been at least partly hick, everything is new and fresh and possible for them, they take nothing for granted — that made him such a great editor and so energized his publications." — David Halberstam in his 1979 book "The Powers That Be," describing Time Inc.'s Henry Luce.