When editors were gods

Yes, it's another nasty magazine editor joke, 1910

“Despairing Mother: He hasn’t the slightest ear for poetry or good literature, and he has no idea at all of what real life is like.

“Friend: He’ll make a bully magazine editor.”

                                                                                 — The Burlington (Kansas) Daily Republican, Oct. 10, 1910

Delivering the magazine that readers deserve

"Our readers, Lewis always used to say, are smarter than we are. Our task was to deliver the magazine they deserved. Editors and writers who assumed that readers were ignorant or lazy or stupid succeeded only in producing material that conformed to those expectations." — Roger D. Hodge, from a series of appreciations of the late Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham in the magazine's November 2024 issue. Hodge succeeded Lapham as editor in 2006.

Those mysterious, uncommunicative editors

"One of the strangest characteristics of a number of successful editors (but not all) is that they can be mysteriously uncommunicative. For example, their sub-editors won't always know what they are talking about or what is wanted from the staff. Yet in some (even stranger) way, that editor strongly shapes his magazine in his own image, and creates a dynamic spirit which transmits itself to the editorial contributors, the readers, and the business audience."

—Clay Felker, writing in 1969. A year earlier, Felker had become the editor of New York Magazine, which he co-founded with the designer Milton Glaser. By all accounts, he was far from uncommunicative.

It can only have been jealousy...

Why else would newspaper editors have run so many magazine editor jokes?

Here's another one, published on this day in 1930:

"Proud Mother: I do hope our little Junior is bright in school.

"Daddy (none too optimistic): Well, we can always make him a magazine editor."

                         — The Emeryville Golden Gate Herald, Oakland, Calif., Oct. 17, 1930

 

A magazine editor "joke," 1907

"Magazine editor: Why do you persist in coming here? I tell you I don't buy fiction.

"The Lady Author: Oh! I don't wish to sell you any of my stories. I am writing a novel, entitled 'The Ugliest Man on Earth,' and I came in merely to obtain local color."

— The Buffalo News, Jan. 7, 1907. This well-traveled joke appeared in numerous U.S., Canadian, and British newspapers. "Lady authors" were often characterized as the bane of magazine editors, second only to aspiring poets.