When editors were gods

Readers who live to find a mistake

"To discover a mistake is a source of keen, even hideous and malignant satisfaction to a certain type of mind. It is an evidence of prowess. I know men and women who would rather uncover a departure from fact, a small technical error, in a book or a magazine, than eat. It acts as a drug, a sedative. They get drunk on an ecstatic glee, over the shortcomings of someone else — and their own keen perceptions." — W. Livingston Larned, writing in The Editor magazine, 1915.

Larned was, at various points in this career and sometimes simultaneously, an editor, author, illustrator, art director, and advertising expert. His most enduring work seems to be "Father Forgets."

 

Two formulas for publishing a magazine, 1913

"There are two ways of publishing a magazine. One is not to print anything that will offend anyone and the other is to print as much as possible that will offend the most people possible." — Edwin Emery Slosson, in a 1913 speech.

Slosson, who seems to have had a Ph.D. in chemistry, was an editor with The Independent magazine at the time.

Hollywood editor gets unexpected blast of publicity

On this day (April 26) in 1960, a bomb exploded outside the Los Angeles office of Hollywood Close-Up, a publication variously described as a movie magazine, trade paper, scandal sheet, and mimeographed newsletter. [Anybody here ever seen a copy?]

No one was hurt, but according to a UPI report, the blast could be heard more than five miles away, "blowing out the rear wall, shattering windows, and causing damage estimated at $5,000." Some news reports said a bomb had been hurled from a passing car, others that one had been placed outside a back door to the building. The explosion seems to have happened around 4 a.m.

Editor Jaik Rosenstein,who had previously worked for the powerful gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, was known for his "scathing editorial attacks on such figures as Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Elizabeth Taylor," and others, the UPI reported. According to the New York Daily News, he had recently been assailing Communists in the movie business.

"I don't think any of the people I have attacked would be personally involved in the explosion," Rosenstein said, "but they will be pleased it happened."

 

 

 

 

 

Editor misses whipping, takes dissing

"There was a time in this country when editors expected to be horse-whipped periodically." — Robert Fuoss, editor of The Saturday Evening Post, speaking to a Detroit advertising group in 1962.

Fuoss was arguing that magazines and newspapers had become too fearful of controversy, and as a result duller, in part to please their timid advertisers.

Fuoss, who officially took over as editor of the Post in January 1962, with the retirement of his longtime boss Ben Hibbs, led a brave but much-ridiculed attempt to make the magazine more contemporary. He resigned in March 1962, after less than three months in the job, due to "irreconcilable differences with management on matters of policy."  

That fall, Matthew Culligan, president of Curtis Publishing, told a reporter, "To some extent the magazine got in the hands of the Bohemians and the finger-painters. We're going back, within reason, to what The Saturday Evening Post used to be."

 

 

A magazine editor joke, 1929

"And then there's the case of the magazine editor's wife who, when he got back home at 2 a.m., rejected his story." — The Ventura County (California) Star, May 10, 1929.

The successful woman magazine editor, 1954

"And no one is startled in 1954 by the idea that a successful woman magazine editor would sacrifice her power for the joys of love in the arms of some strong and dominant male." —  Critic Ben Gross, reviewing a television revival of the 1941 Broadway musical "Lady in the Dark" in the New York Daily News, September 27, 1954.

The fictional woman in question is editor of a fashion magazine named Allure. 

A Roosevelt leads a polite regime change, 1948

"You don't go in where other people are already working and change everything." — Anna Roosevelt, asked by Newsweek about her plans for The Woman magazine, which had just named her its new editor, 1948.

Roosevelt, the lone daughter of Franklin and Eleanor, already had a bit of magazine experience, having served as her mother's associate editor on the short-lived Babies Just Babies magazine, published by the one and only Bernarr Macfadden.

Author throws the book at magazine editors

"Every magazine editor ought to do time in the penitentiary. I can name half a dozen who ought to be up for life, but I'll except George Horace Lorimer and give him only ten years." — Donn Byrne, American-born Irish novelist and short-story writer, quoted by the newspaper writer Harry Hansen, shortly after Byrne's death in 1928.

According to Hansen, Byrne was lamenting that "magazine editors had done more to kill off young writing genius than any other agency... [and] he was hoping that they'd get their deserts."

He was probably not totally kidding.

George Horace Lorimer was the longtime editor of The Saturday Evening Post.