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"You are the living god. You are not there to please the writers, but the writers are there to satisfy you because they want to be in the magazine." — Robert Gottlieb, onetime New Yorker editor, quoted in his obituary in today's New York Times. Gottlieb was contrasting magazine editing with book editing, where, he said, the editor's job was "to serve the book and the writer."
Gottlieb's memoir, "Avid Reader," was published in 2016.
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As of June 1, anyone can access the Time.com website, including 100 years of back issues, free of charge. Readers of this blog might want to check out the magazine's extensive (if often bite-size) coverage of its own industry over the decades.
There is, for example, its 1977 portrait of Clay Felker, then riding high at New York magazine: "He is variously described by associates and acquaintances as autocratic, devious, dishonest, rapacious, egotistical, power mad, paranoid, a bully and a boor. Almost in the same breath, the same people call Felker a genius."
Or its 1929 account of a cloak-and-dagger operation by Cosmopolitan magazine and its "short, stocky, chesty Editor [Ray] Long" to publish a reminiscence by the departing president Calvin Coolidge without competitors finding out about it first. (Apparently getting anything out of Silent Cal was a very big deal at the time.)
Or a 1965 item announcing that one Helen Gurley Brown, 43, had been appointed editor of Cosmopolitan — a magazine she would soon make unrecognizable to readers of Ray Long's day. "The magazine is bubbling with enthusiasm over its new editor, even though she has had no editing experience," Time reported.
There's a lot more here, some of which we'll explore in future posts.
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"Automobile manufacturers, novelists, fathers and magazine editors all have one trait in common — an unrestrained enthusiasm for the future. A man involved in any one of these risky ventures is perfectly willing to talk to you about his current model (convertible, whodunit, elder child, June issue), but if you really want to see a spark in his eye and hear him burble with hopeful pride, ask him about his next effort — the 1956 car, the unpublished manuscript, the newborn baby, the July issue." — from an editor's note in Holiday magazine, June 1955.
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