When editors were gods

The typical editor's office, 1927

“Today your editor is rather inclined to look like an East Indian potentate surrounded by all the pomp and ceremony that hedge a king. He sits inviolate and immured within paneling of Mexican mahogany, under mellowing oil paintings and surrounded by onyx pillars and Persian rugs and rosewood desk tops, with an undersecretary who receives you in the waiting room upholstered with brown Morocco, and ushers you into the anteroom with probably a Louis Quinze motif predominating, where you are received by the great one’s personal lady confidante and eventually passed into the royal presence itself.” — an anonymous “author’s wife,” who seems to have accompanied her hubby on visits to editors, writing in The Saturday Evening Post in 1927.

By all accounts the author was Margaret Stringer, whose husband, Arthur Stringer, was a well-known novelist, poet, and magazine writer. That same year she published a widely praised book on the topic, “Confessions of an Author's Wife,” also anonymously.

The secret of success in magazine work (also circuses)

"A shrewd understanding of human nature, a real sympathy with it, is the secret of success in magazine work, as in running a department store, a church, or a circus." — James Eaton Tower, editor of Good Housekeeping magazine, writing on "Educated Women in Magazine Work," a chapter in the book "Vocations for the Trained Woman: Opportunities Other Than Teaching" (1910).

Tower was the ring master of Good Housekeeping from 1899 to 1913.

One writer on his fear of editors

"I know in my heart that editors are poor fish (because they often turn down manuscripts of mine that I know are superior to anything they ever saw before), but I fear them just as if they had real intelligence." — Ellis Parker Butler, in his 1923 book, "Ghosts What Ain't."

Butler (1869-1937) was a prolific and popular humorist in his day.

 

Henry Miller shares his uncensored opinion of editors

"Editors are anathema to me. I have never allowed any editor to do any editing of my work.... Magazine editors are the worst offenders. They say, 'Don't you think this paragraph would be better here instead of there?' And I say, 'No, I don't. Take it or leave it.'" — Henry Miller, author of the much-banned "Tropic of Cancer" and other books, in his 1971 autobiography, "My Life and Times."

The editor and illustrator who fathered the famous New Year’s baby

The Saturday Evening Post didn’t invent the New Year’s baby, but it might as well have. While countless magazines have put babies on their covers to note the arrival of a new year — The New Yorker, Liberty, Collier’s, and Mad, to name a diverse few — the Post’s idealized infant, drawn for decades by J.C. Leyendecker, became the most familiar by far.

“If The Saturday Evening Post was known for one image, it was J.C. Leyendecker’s New Year’s Baby, which, since 1906, had been bouncing joyously onto the cover in top hats and various getups,” Deborah Solomon wrote in “American Mirror,” her 2013 biography of Leyendecker’s friend and fellow illustrator Norman Rockwell.

That would not have been possible but for the Post’s all-powerful editor, George Horace Lorimer.

John Tebbel, author of a 1948 Lorimer biography, noted that the New Year cover was “always a Leyendecker canvas and uniformly beloved by the Boss.”

But as much as the Boss revered Leyendecker’s work, “no illustrator, whatever his fame, had control over a cover of the Post. Like everything else in the magazine, the cover belonged to Lorimer. He would review a set of potential covers rapidly, dismissing most with a cursory glance and a terse ‘Out,’” Jan Cohn wrote in the 1995 book “Covers of The Saturday Evening Post.”

Leyendecker, a celebrated illustrator who created the iconic Arrow Collar Man for shirt ads and drew a record 322 Post covers, delivered his first New Year’s baby for the magazine’s December 29, 1906 issue, marking the coming of 1907. The baby, a girl with a bow in her hair and angel wings on her back, had a pinkish hue, made possible by the magazine’s two-color (black and red) printing process.

For 1908 the baby, possibly a boy, is accompanied by a stork. In 1910, he or she is joined by a Father Time-type codger symbolizing the old year. The baby appears to be attempting to sell the old man a copy of the Post. 

 

Leyendecker's 1908 New Year's baby and friend. Credit: Wikimedia Commmons

As the years went by, the baby changed with the times. In December 1911, a girl baby totes a sign promoting women’s suffrage. The December 30, 1916 cover shows a worried-looking baby surveying the world globe, the warring nations of Europe shaded in black. For December 29, 1917, six months after the U.S. entry into the war, a helmeted baby stands at attention and salutes, a sword conveniently covering his (or her) private parts.

The Post began printing covers in four colors in the 1920s. The baby was a little slow to adapt, but by the late 1920s and early 1930s, he or she was in full color as well.  The December 30, 1933 cover shows a top-hatted baby happily scanning a stock-market ticker tape, presumably hoping that the country’s fortunes would improve in 1934 and reflecting Lorimer’s upbeat, pro-business attitude.

When Europe went to war once more, Leyendecker’s tone became less optimistic. For the December 30, 1939 cover, the baby is wearing a gas mask. The following year, a crying baby dangles by its diaper from a sinister iron-gloved hand. For the January 3, 1942 cover, the baby is back in uniform — a military-style cap, at least — astride the globe and guarding the Western Hemisphere with a cocked pop gun. Given the magazine’s production lead times, it’s unlikely that it or Leyendecker had yet had time to react to the country’s entry into the war in December 1941. But in January 2, 1943, the baby is in full combat mode, helmeted, armed with a rifle, and jabbing a swastika with his bayonet. The magazine had rejected another Leyendecker concept for that year's cover, showing the baby hitchhiking to war, reportedly concerned that it hit a little too close to home for soldiers' families; the unpublished painting was auctioned off in 2020 for $275,000.

That cover would be the baby’s last. Lorimer had retired in 1936 and died in 1937. Under a new editorial regime, the magazine was now running more photographs on its cover. While Norman Rockwell and several other illustrators continued to produce covers, Leyendecker was out. He died in 1951 at age 77.

One magazine editor's beautiful dream... shared by many

"When at times I read the despairing lamentations of contributors who declare that their work has been ruined by too many changes and the derisive outcries of those critics who point out that too few have been made, I sometimes have a beautiful dream of allowing one number of the magazine to go out into the world with every contributor displaying just that degree of art and skill that he has received from his Maker, untouched by the polishing-brush of the editor." — L. Frank Tooker, in his 1924 book "The Joys and Tribulations of an Editor."

Tooker was an editor with The Century, a major magazine in its day.

F. Scott Fitzgerald telegraphs his frustration with editors

"I GUESS THERE ARE NO GREAT MAGAZINE EDITORS LEFT." — F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1939 telegram to his (book) editor Maxwell Perkins. Fitzgerald was frustrated that Collier's magazine was wavering on whether to buy serial rights to his novel in progress, "The Last Tycoon."

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Fitzgerald's longtime benefactor George Horace Lorimer of The Saturday Evening Post had died two years earlier.

The telegram is quoted in Arthur Mizener's 1951 biography of Fitzgerald, "The Far Side of Paradise."

He likened magazine editing to writing a novel, then turned novelist himself

"Magazine editing is a form of creation just as much as painting a picture or writing a novel…. I want to stay in the magazine business the rest of my life." — Larry Sanders, features editor of Mechanix Illustrated, quoted in a 1958 Writer's Digest article.

Alas, it was not to be. In 1970 Lawrence Sanders published a best-selling crime thriller, "The Anderson Tapes," leading him to switch forms of creation. The novel, the first of many by Sanders, was also made into a 1971 Sean Connery movie.

 

The late Roger Angell remembers the late William Shawn

"The only piece of advice I ever got from William Shawn was something he said to me in 1956, in my very first week as an editor at the magazine. 'It's no great trick,' he said, 'to edit a piece of fiction and turn it into the greatest story ever written. Anyone can do that. It's much harder to take a story and help that writer turn it into the best thing he is capable of this week or this month.' I've tried to keep that in mind. What you hope for is that the writer will sense how this process works, and will learn to trust it." — Roger Angell, longtime editor at The New Yorker, in his 2006 memoir, "Let Me Finish."

Ever the editor, he offers a somewhat different version of Shawn's quote in his 2015 memoir, "This Old Man."

Angell died yesterday at age 101.

Happy 100th birthday, Reader’s Digest… and the mystery of its two forgotten editors

This month, February 2022, marks the 100^th anniversary of the Reader's Digest, the first issue of which carried the cover date of February 1922. Co-founders DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Acheson Wallace, married the previous October, borrowed enough money to finance a press run of 5,000 copies.

The debut Digest, seen at right in all its black-and-white glory, listed four editors with otherwise unspecified titles. They appeared in this order: Lila Bell Acheson, DeWitt Wallace, Louise M. Patteson, and Hazel J. Cubberley. Who, you might wonder, were Patteson and Cubberley, and whatever happened to them?

Peter Canning, in his 1996 book, "American Dreamers: The Wallaces and Reader’s Digest, An Insider’s Story," writes that, "Louise and Hazel were merely female window dressing—cousins of Lila's—and had nothing to do with the magazine."

The "window dressing" part may be true. Canning's point is that the Wallaces at that juncture envisioned The Digest as a magazine primarily for women. Interestingly, the magazine's prototype issue, created pre-Lila and dated January 1920, lists DeWitt as the lone editor.

However, Louise Patteson was, in fact, Lila's sister-in-law. She was married to Lila's older brother, Barclay Acheson, and used her maiden name on the masthead. She also appears in Canning's book, as well as John Heidenry's 1993 one, "Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest," under the name Pat Acheson. At her death in 1968, at age 80, the New York Times reported that she had been "an amateur metal craftsman, specializing in enamel overglazes on silver" as well as a "breeder of champion English sheepdogs." 

Barclay, meanwhile, later went to work for The Digest in various positions until his death, at age 70, in 1957.

Heidenry also identifies Hazel J. Cubberley as an Acheson cousin. She doesn't seem to have had any further role with The Digest. At the time of the first issue, she was the director of athletics at the wonderfully named Savage School for Physical Education in New York City, and in 1925 she moved west to UCLA. Cubberley's editorial adventures weren't entirely over, however. In addition to a number of articles in professional journals, she was the author or co-author of several books, including "Field Hockey and Soccer for Women" (1923) and "Field Hockey Analyzed" (1928).

For more Digest history, may I recommend this article on 60 Reader’s Digest Covers to Celebrate 100 Years.

The editor's nightmare

"An actor's nightmare, it is said, is appearing on the stage with no apparel; an editor's is an empty schedule." — Charles Hanson Towne, writing in 1933.

Famous in his day, largely forgotten in ours, Towne edited The Delineator, Harper's Bazaar, McClure's, and the Smart Set. He also wrote two memoirs, "Adventures in Editing" (1926) and "So Far, So Good" (1945), and was a well-regarded poet, to boot.

John O'Hara's (very bad) advice re: editors

"Once you have finished a story, there's only one way to improve it: tell the editor to go to hell." — Novelist John O'Hara offering advice to fellow writer Jerome Weidman, as quoted in Geoffrey Wolff's 2003 O'Hara biography, "The Art of Burning Bridges."