When editors were gods

Suppose there were no editors, 1898

“The editors stand guard over a treasure — publicity, fame — which the writers strongly wish to possess, and which they feel sure they could secure, but for the formidable barriers which these guardians have erected around it….

“But suppose there were no guardians. Suppose the editors should throw down these fences, disband their armies of defense, and put this treasure in an open field where everybody should have it for the taking, would it then be a treasure? Would it be worth having?” — Frank Lee Farnell, editor of Leslie's Popular Monthly, 1898.

The fashionable but unseasonable editor, 1912

 

A cartoon from the Topeka State Journal, February 16, 1912, via Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

The cartoonist seems to be sympathizing with (or perhaps making fun of) magazine editors, who can become, by the nature of their publications' long lead times, perpetually out of sync with the seasons outside their office windows. 

If anybody knows more about this cartoonist, please let us know.

 

Seventeen editor learns diamonds aren't forever, 1959

It was on this day (April 22) in 1959 that Enid Haupt, the longtime editor of Seventeen magazine, reported to police that an $80,000 diamond ring belonging to her had gone missing. Haupt said she thought she might have left it in the washroom at Seventeen two days earlier, although no one seems to have turned it in in the meantime. In today's dollars, the ring would have been worth about $700,000.

If any editor could afford to lose an $80,000 ring, it was probably Haupt, an Annenberg heiress whose family owned Seventeen and TV Guide at the time. She died in 2005 at age 99, leaving her name on many worthy philanthropic projects. 

Don’t put all your eggs in one in-basket

“For a writer to tie himself exclusively to one magazine is bad policy, though the temptation is strong. More than once I have been almost caught in this net, and the consequences were not easy to retrieve. Once, attracted by the ease with which I sold articles to a certain magazine, I neglected to keep up other connections, and one day I found a new editor in the sanctum that had been so friendly. New editors have their own ideas and entourage, and as a rule they are hostile to what has gone before.” — Edward Mott Woolley, in his 1928 book, "Writing for Real Money.”

Woolley, who died in 1947, wrote for such magazines as Collier's, McClure's, the Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner's. Another of his books is "Free-Lancing for Forty Magazines," published in 1927.

 

 

An editor defines the 'model magazine article'

"My definition of a model magazine article is one that interests alike the person who knows all about the subject and the one who knows nothing about it." — Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of The Century magazine from 1909 to 1913, in his 1923 memoir, "Remembered Yesterdays."

A slight variation on this quote appeared in The Editor magazine in 1917, but since this one is later, we can assume that Johnson had edited himself in the meantime.

A contest for the best collection of rejection slips, 1935

A prize for aspiring authors with the best collection of rejection slips was announced on this day (April 18) in 1935. The contest was sponsored by a group called the Leisure League of America, whose mission seems to have been to encourage Americans to use their free time more creatively. And in 1935, many Americans had lots of free time.

The winner was to receive a scholarship for a short story writing course at Washington Square College of New York University, and Fannie Hurst and Christopher Morley, two popular writers of the day, were among those serving as judges. As the Associated Press explained the rules, "Five points will be given for each slip, with between 50 and 100 points extra for encouraging words which editors send with the rejections."

Follow-up articles on May 7 announced that nine finalists had been chosen and that their rejection slips were now on display at the Leisure League's Hobby Round-up, then going on at the Port Authority Building in New York City. The New York Times named all nine, none of whom seems to have become a successful writer. The first-place finisher was to have been announced before the Hobby Round-up came to an close, but if that ever happened the papers seem not to have reported on it.

You do have to wonder what it was like for writers who submitted their rejection slips to the contest only to have them rejected. 

 

 

The magazine poet who wrote his way out of prison

John Carter, who gained national fame as the “prison poet” when his poems appeared in major magazines, walked out of the Minnesota State Penitentiary in Stillwater on this day (April 18) in 1910, a free man. Carter’s early release was due, in large measure, to the lobbying of magazine editors who had published his work, most notably Robert Underwood Johnson editor of the Century magazine and a poet himself.

April 18 also happened to be Carter’s 24^th birthday — or so he claimed. Much about him was a mystery, including his real name. He refused to divulge it, apparently even to prison officials, saying he didn’t want to embarrass his family back home in England.

What was known was that he’d been arrested five years earlier after breaking into a railroad station one wintry night and stealing $24. He said he’d been booted off a freight train and hadn’t eaten in 36 hours. The judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Some days before his release was announced, Carter was visited in prison by a reporter for the New York Times. Asked how he came to write poetry, Carter said, “I have been doing it only for the last six months or so. Before that I devoted myself entirely to writing prose for The Prison Mirror. Then I wanted to send stuff to the magazines. Verse was less bulky, you know. If I tried to send large manuscripts out of this place I’d have trouble. It is easier to get small envelopes and it doesn’t look as if you were writing so much.”

In short order he managed to sell poems to the Century, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Weekly, McClure’s, and the Smart Set, among other magazines.

In addition to purchasing his poetic wares, Johnson had exchanged letters with Carter. “I became interested in his case, not only on account of the merit of his verses, but also from the manly tone in which his communications were couched,” Johnson said. “He has unbosomed himself to me in his letters. I believe this young man is worth saving.”

Even before his release had become official, Carter had job offers from at least two magazines, a newspaper, and several vaudeville houses. The New York Times said he hoped to get a job playing the piano or the clarinet. He was open to magazine work, the paper reported, “but it is evident that he does not believe remuneration for writing is very big.” He told other reporters that he planned to give up writing altogether.

What he did next isn’t clear. That fall, the New York Times reported that he had gone home to England to visit his family but would be returning to the U.S. to take a job as a prison inspector. A Minnesota paper reported that he’d been playing clarinet in a New York orchestra.

In 1911, the book publisher Baker & Taylor brought out a collection of Carter’s previously published work called “Hard Labor and Other Poems.”  The book provided no further clues to his identity, but Johnson, in a letter plugging the jolly-sounding title as the perfect Christmas gift, assured readers that, “John Carter, under his real name, is ‘making good.’”

After that the trail goes cold.

Back in Stillwater, however, Carter continued to be an inspiration. As the Associated Press reported in 1927, “So full of poets is the Minnesota penitentiary that once a year the prison issues a volume of verse written by inmates. Seventy-two poems are contained in this year’s edition.”

 

 

 

 

 

The Titanic survivor who took an icy view of editors

"All editors write, or have written; therefore little excuse exists for any of them to become tactless, hard, or insolent when the editorial chair is gained." — Author Helen Churchill Hungerford Candee, in her 1900 book "How Women May Earn a Living."

Presumably toughened by her own dealings with editors, Candee went on to survive the Titanic disaster. The rescue ship Carpathia delivered her and 704* other survivors to Pier 54 on the Hudson River in New York City 107 years ago tomorrow (April 18, 1912). She died in 1949.

* The exact number of Titanic survivors varies according to different accounts. Walter Lord in his classic "A Night to Remember" puts the total at 705, which is the basis for the number above.

 

The Titanic moved this editor to poetry

One of the best-known editors of his day, Charles Hanson Towne was also a popular poet. Today he's largely forgotten in both roles, but he had a good run during the first half of the 20th century.  Among the magazines Towne edited, or held major posts on, were the Delineator, the Designer, Harper's Bazaar, McClure's, and the Smart Set. As a poet, he published at least three collections. He also wrote other books, including a pair of memoirs, "Adventures in Editing" (1926) and "So Far, So Good" (1945). 

When the Titanic sank on April 14-15, 1912, and Towne was editing the Designer magazine, he wrote a poem called "The Harvest of the Sea" that was published in the Bookman, another major magazine of the era. In it, he portrays the ocean as a sort of Stephen King monster, just waiting for the Titanic to glide by, full of juicy passengers.

"I am hungry for brave souls," Towne quotes it as saying. "I crave / Their warmth and passion through my chilling tides; / Their heads upon by bosom, and their hands, / Like children's hands, about me in the dark. / I need their blood in my cold loneliness."

The entire poem, in its original magazine context, may be found here. 

 

 

 

A legendary editor lets go, 1978

Many subscribers to the Saturday Review were in for a surprise when they opened their April 15, 1978 issues. The venerable Norman Cousins, who’d run the title for the better part of four decades, a man more closely identified with his magazine than perhaps any other editor of his time, was signing off. And a little-known new editor, all of 26 years old, was taking over.

The new editor, Carll Tucker, began his debut editor’s page by noting that the Saturday Review was more than twice his age. “This,” he added, “is an edifying thought.”

Cousins shared his own thoughts in a two-and-a-half page “Open Letter to Carll Tucker,” urging him to, among other things, stay close to his readers, ignore any pressure to prove he was “with it,” and not let writers “cheapen the language” in the magazine. Though mostly cordial and complimentary, Cousins did point out that before arriving at the Saturday Review, apparently bursting with ideas for improving it, “you had had no previous magazine experience.”

Experienced or not, young Tucker had ascended to his post in a time-honored fashion: He’d bought the Saturday Review a year earlier with a group of investors.

The magazine had passed through a series of owners by then, at one point being split into four separate monthlies (Saturday Review of the Arts, …of Education, …of the Sciences,  and …of the Society), a move that Tucker calls “one of the worst editorial decisions ever made in the magazine business. It was a disaster.”

The disaster hadn’t happened on Cousins’s watch; he’d left the magazine earlier in a dispute with the owners. But it gave him the opportunity to regain control. He bought the magazine in a 1973 bankruptcy proceeding and relaunched it as Saturday Review World.

Even so, the magazine continued to struggle financially. According to a New York Times account, Tucker was applying for a job as theater critic there when Cousins happened to ask him if he’d like to buy it.

“The reason a 25-year-old would be tapped to do this was that nobody else was crazy enough,” Tucker said in an interview the other day. “I knew nothing of the business side of publishing. I didn’t even know what a balance sheet was.”

Although the transition didn’t happen officially until 1978, as Tucker remembers, “I was pretty much the editor from the day I arrived [in 1977]. Norman was around, but he was moving on to the next phase of his life.”

Cousins still had opinions about his magazine, though, and apparently didn’t hesitate to share them. “Every innovation that I brought in he hated,” Tucker recalls. Cousins might also have been displeased by some of Tucker’s public comments about the magazine, such as telling the New York Times advertising columnist Phil Dougherty, “We have the unfair reputation as a magazine for doddering librarians in the Midwest.” At least he said “unfair.”

Tucker sold the magazine in 1980 but, as part of the deal, stayed on as its editor. “I got the investors’ money out by selling it — twice,” he says. The first sale was to CBS, which Tucker says intended to make the magazine a print companion to “60 Minutes.” When that fell through, due to executive changes at the network, he sold it to Macro Communications, which also published the magazine Financial World. The Saturday Review would limp along in various incarnations until 1986

But Tucker left the magazine, and magazine editing, in May 1981. With another group of investors, he bought the Patent Trader, a Westchester County, New York, newspaper his late father had founded. “I thought, why not try profitable publishing for a change of pace?” In 2010 he launched what would become a network of hyperlocal online news sites in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, now known as the Daily Voice. Last year he retired, but remains on as founder. “I’m Colonel Sanders to the company,” he says.

As to the Saturday Review, it may be a mere blip on his résumé at this point, but it seems to have been a formative experience in its way. “It was some education in publishing for a young man,” he says.

The famous novelist and former women's magazine editor who missed the Titanic

On this day (April 15) in 1912, Theodore Dreiser, onetime women's magazine editor turned famous novelist, learned that the R.M.S. Titanic had stuck an iceberg the previous evening and sunk in the early morning. Dreiser was also at sea, aboard the Red Star liner Kroonland, when he heard the news. He might have been on the Titanic himself had an English publisher not talked him out of it, saying the Kroonland would be cheaper and the Titanic, being new and on its maiden voyage, might be uncomfortable. 

Dreiser recounts his reaction to the news in his 1913 book, "A Traveler at Forty": "To think of a ship as immense as the Titanic, new and bright, sinking in endless fathoms of water. And the two thousand passengers routed like rats from their berths only to float helplessly in miles of water, praying and crying!" 

The editor who went down with the Titanic, reading

"Editors are sometimes like other people, natural born fools, and they sometimes fail to see on which side their bread is buttered; but take the average editor and give him an article which is up to date and on the nail, and just comes in the nick of time, and contains information, or illustration, or reflections which are not otherwise available, and he will be very naturally tempted to use that article." — W. T. (William Thomas) Stead, editor of The Review of Reviews in an essay, "Some Advice to Would-Be Journalists."

Stead was aboard the R.M.S. Titanic when it struck an iceberg 107 years ago tonight, April 14, 1912, and went down with the ship in the early hours of April 15. A major British editor of his day, he was the author of several books, including the memorably titled "If Christ Came to Chicago!" (1894). Stead's magazine also spawned a successful U.S. version, the American Review of Reviews.

In his classic book about the Titanic disaster, "A Night to Remember," Walter Lord recounts this conversation that he says took place between Stead and the American painter Frank Millet, shortly after the ship grazed the fatal iceberg.

Stead: "What do they say is the trouble?"

Millet: "Icebergs."

Stead: "Well, I guess it's nothing serious. I'm going back to my cabin to read."

At the time of his death, Stead was 62.