When editors were gods

A magazine poet's biting take on editors, 1958

"Have you ever groused around chewing on an eraser and wishing it was an editor's ear?" — Ethel Jacobson, writing in The Author and Journalist magazine, 1958.

Jacobson was primarily a magazine poet, back when there was such a thing. Her 1991 obituary in the Los Angeles Times says she "wrote more than 6,000 verses, 100 articles and six books, including two about cats."

 

The humble secret of editorial greatness, 1932

“An editor is great because of his wastebasket. His judgment is far better measured by what he rejects than by what he accepts.” — Harry B. Center, writing in The Writer magazine, 1932.

Center was at the time the head of Boston University’s journalism department.

R.I.P. Victor Navasky

Victor S. Navasky, longtime editor of The Nation, died on Monday (January 23) at age 90.

Both during and after his run at The Nation, Navasky proved to be an astute and witty observer of the magazine scene. His books include the memoir "A Matter of Opinion" (2005), which recounts his experiences editing the influential but financially fragile liberal opinion magazine, and "The Art of Making Magazines" (2012), edited with Evan Cornog, in which an assortment of well-known magazine types share their wisdom.

In an unsigned editor's note in the 2007 edition of The New York Review of Magazines that is generally attributed to him, Navasky (we assume) wrote that, "The nice way to say it is that great magazines are the product of visionary editors. The other way to say it is that interesting magazines are spawned by self-centered megalomaniacs."

 

 

The editor’s pronouns (one of them, anyway)

“Editors and crowned heads are the only people in the world — bar a certain historic exception — with the right to say we. Editors should be the only despots.” — George Horace Lorimer, powerful longtime editor of The Saturday Evening Post in a 1908 interview.

Not sure what he means by “a certain historic exception.” Anybody know?

Happy centennial, Time magazine

This year (2023) marks the 100^th anniversary of Time magazine, as its cover has already started reminding us.

The first issue of Time, all 32 pages if it including covers, was dated March 3, 1923. A tiny masthead at the bottom of page 23 lists the soon-to-die-young Briton Hadden and the soon-to-be-really-rich Henry R. Luce as editors.

Before launching their magazine, Hadden and Luce had shown a prototype to H.L. Mencken, hoping for his approval. Mencken’s reported reaction: “It will never work.”

Time’s centennial follows by a year that of another hugely successful magazine of the 20^th century, Reader’s Digest. Though different in many respects, both magazines were created and edited to serve the same basic need, that of busy Americans who wanted to stay informed but didn’t have the time or desire to read everything.  

Setting a rather high bar for contributors, 1916

“Whatever appears in a magazine should manifest genius.

“A magazine editor should decline any contribution, even if the President wrote it, that is not obviously the work of a man of genius.”

—Alexander Harvey, in his weekly publication The Bang, April 17, 1916.

A biographical sketch written by H.L. Mencken notes that Harvey was at various times a newspaper reporter and editor, a novelist and short story writer, and the author of books on Robert Louis Stevenson, William Dean Howells, Percy Bysshe Shelley, socialism, and the “woman question.” He was also an editor of the magazine Current Opinion.

George R.R. Martin on editors (and the two other most important things in the world)

"Left to their own devices, writers talk about only three things; the three most important things in the world. They talk about money, they talk about sex and they talk about editors. Money and sex are things that most writers want and never get enough of. Editors are things that most writers don't want and get all too much of." — George R.R. Martin, writing in Science Fiction Review, 1979.

You mean that's not what editors look like?

"I used to picture the editor in some such way as 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 check book at his left elbow, a mail chute at his right, and a pile of shop-worn manuscripts before him; and if he pulled the check book 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, in The Writer magazine, 1933.

Kempton was a novelist, short-story writer, and professor of English.

Editor accuses alleged kitten skinner, and the fur flies

On this day (January 6) in 1928, newspapers reported that Jesse Pomeroy, a longtime lifer in the Massachusetts State Prison, was suing Alice Stone Blackwell, noted suffragist and editor of The Woman's Journal, for $5,000. Blackwell had accused Pomeroy of skinning a live kitten in his jail cell, not in the pages of her magazine but in a 1925 letter to a Boston newspaper, opposing his possible parole. Pomeroy denied the accusation. Blackwell said her letter was fair comment. The jury sided with Pomeroy but awarded him just $1 in damages.

Is this what Isaac Asimov really thought of editors?

"Editors are fiends, one and all, and it is a worthy task to get even with them after being at odds with them. It would be a happier, a purer, a more fragrant world if every editor were buried under a huge heap of stinking maradram, though that, of course, would make the smell worse." — Azazel, a "two-centimeter extraterrestrial being" who appears in a number of Isaac Asimov's fictional works, speaking of the editors where he comes from. The story, which seems to have originally appeared in the magazine Analog Science Fiction & Fact, is included in the author's "Magic: The Final Fantasy Stories" (1996).

In addition to being an extraordinarily prolific writer, Asimov was at least nominally a magazine editor, of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I worked for another magazine published by the same company, and while I don't know how hands-on he was as an editor, he did put in frequent appearances at his namesake's offices. One year, in fact, he dressed as Santa Claus and handed out the Secret Santa gifts at our company's holiday party. Unfortunately, he apparently overplayed his dirty old man persona, and he didn't reprise the role after that.