When editors were gods

Why editors are big on Big Names

"The attitude of the average magazine editor is to feed the public the same Big Names year in and year out, their idea presumably being that the public doesn't want to read anyone else and that only those names will keep the circulation up to a figure that will still please the publishers and allow them to commute to Palm Beach and the Riviera." — William Rose Benét, writing in The Saturday Review of Literature, 1934.

Benét was an all-around man of letters, particularly a poet, and something of a Big Name in his own right. He was also one of the founders of The Saturday Review.

R.I.P. Lewis H. Lapham, 1935-2024

Lewis H. Lapham, longtime editor of Harper’s magazine, died this past Tuesday (July 23, 2024) at age 89.

Among many other accomplishments, Lapham presided over a remarkably lively transformation of Harper’s in the 1980s.

In a 1995 essay occasioned by the death of Otto Friedrich, Lapham credited the former Saturday Evening Post editor for teaching him “the better part of what I know about editing a magazine.”

A writer at the time, Lapham described the experience of being edited by Friedrich:

“Otto invariably deleted the lead paragraph (“ornamental,” “pointless,” “a waste of space”) as well as the next three or four pages in which I had staged an elaborate introduction of character and scene. Somewhere on page four or five he would discover the narrative line and there, impatiently pointing his pencil at a short declarative sentence uncluttered with adjectives, he would say, ‘Here. Begin here. With the story.’”

Domineering, almost ruthless—and of course a great magazine editor

"Mr. Lorimer had a domineering, almost ruthless personality. Like all the great tycoons—Ford, Rockefeller. He created an institution in his own image, out of himself, and of course he was one of the great magazine editors of all time. He was, in a sense, the Post, all of it. It was his magazine from the front cover to the back. And he had to assert himself constantly in everything—rejecting three out of five of my sketches, for instance—because if he had relinquished one prerogative the whole complicated structure which he had built would have collapsed. (Not really, of course, but he must have felt that way subconsciously.)" — Norman Rockwell, reflecting on the legendary Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer in his 1960 memoir, My Adventures as an Illustrator.

A crime writer cries foul on editors' capricious title changes

"I don’t know why editors—especially magazine editors—insist on changing good titles to invariably lousy ones." — Crime writer Ed McBain, introducing one of his early short stories in his 2006 collection, "Learning to Kill."

In assembling the book, McBain took the opportunity to restore the story's original title.

McBain's title: "Downpour."

Title the editors of Argosy changed it to: "Murder in the Keys."

Which is better? You decide.

Incidentally, McBain was no stranger to changing names, having changed his own from Salvatore Albert Lombino to Evan Hunter. He also had an assortment of pseudonyms, McBain being the most famous.

The children's magazine editor and the famous dike

The legend of the little Dutch boy who saves his town by plugging a leaking dike with his finger was apparently concocted by Mary Mapes Dodge for her 1865 children's book Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates. Dodge was also the founder and editor of the most famous children's magazine of her day (and long after), St. Nicholas.

Interestingly, according to this expert, the legend is virtually unknown among actual Dutch people.

 

 

 

A bound volume of St. Nicholas magazine
from 1916. (Author's Collection)

 

 

 

 

 

 

One famous magazine magnate's bloody secret of success

"The secret of magazine success is: Give the people what they want and give it to them at a right price, and they will do the rest.

"I know only two things that command spontaneous circulation, assuming, of course, that the price is right. A monthly cannot be timely or local; it cannot give news or neighborhood chat. It must depend on two things—first, Fiction; second, Human Blood.

"It is the slaughter of real people that makes Town Topics sell. It was [Thomas W.] Lawson’s flaying of the rich that made Everybody’s sell. It was Ida Tarbell’s carving up of John D. [Rockefeller] that made McClure’s sell.  When we see real citizens burnt at the stake it gives us the same thrill that we get from fiction when the Indians slaughter the Puritans or the villain stabs the hero in the back."

— The hugely successful and widely scorned magazine and newspaper publisher Frank Munsey (Munsey’s, Argosy, and other titles) in a 1908 newspaper interview. Not for nothing was Munsey nicknamed "The Undertaker."