When editors were gods

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.’”

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."

People magazine turns 50: Here's what the critics said in 1974

Today (March 4, 2024) marks the 50th birthday of People magazine, the first issue of which bore the cover date of March 4, 1974.

Although the new Time Inc. weekly was an immediate sensation in terms of newsstand sales and continued to be one of the most successful magazines for decades to come, it was not exactly a critical favorite, especially at the outset.

After running through—and thoroughly savaging—the debut issue's various articles, New York Times columnist William Safire concluded, "Maybe there is money in this sort of thing; if so, publishing empires whose executives harrumph about social responsibility should leave the field to upstart publishers more adept at grubbiness. People fails on the tawdry terms it has chosen: The sex is not sexy, the gossip is not current, the exploitation not with-it. Great effort is needed to lift it up to superficiality."

Over at the Washington Post, Tom Donnelly gave the new magazine points for being "gossipy, crisp, shrewdly derivative, and smartly edited," while noting that "it will tax but the shortest attention spans and it so undemanding that it can be read while the TV commercials are on." He called it "the reading equivalent" of convenience foods.

Steve Barthelme of the Texas Observer waited until People had put out five issues before offering his opinion: "It's difficult to be trendy and out of date at the same time, but so far People has managed. Five Edsels in as many weeks." Anyone who paid their 35 cents for the magazine, he maintained, "got taken in a big way," helpfully adding that "There is a wide variety of tasteful, interesting, exciting, rich and wonderful trash that can be had for 35 cents" and observing that "The ease with which this magazine can be read at a newsstand will amaze you."

R.I.P. Charles Peters, 1926-2023

Charles Peters, longtime editor of The Washington Monthly, died yesterday (November 23, 2023), at age 96.

In his 1988 autobiography, "Tilting at Windmills," published when he was a mere 61 or so, he offered this sage advice:

"There is no advice I can give you that is more important than Do Work You Believe In."

R.I.P. Julia Scully, 1929-2023

Julia Scully, longtime editor of Modern Photography magazine, died on July 18, according to this recently published New York Times obituary.

The magazine has been defunct since 1989 and is probably largely forgotten today. Readers of the time, however, and that includes me, may remember it as the most magical of the several magazines that catered to serious amateur photographers, introducing us not only to the latest gear but to photographers who were doing something interesting.

Weirdly, the relatively lengthy Wikipedia entry for Modern Photography magazine doesn't even mention her—as of today (August 6, 2023), at least. 

Julia Scully was 94.

R.I.P. Robert Gottlieb, 1931-2023

"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.

A Time capsule of magazine history

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.

A nostalgic tribute to a 1970s time capsule

Today's print edition of The New York Times has a charming piece about Apartment Life magazine, long defunct but an amazing time capsule of 1970s furnishings, clothing, hairstyles, values, and all-around grooviness.(Old magazines, maybe more than any other medium, seem to have this power to take us back to another era.)

The Internet Archive has quite a few back issues of the magazine, though, alas, in black-and-white.

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."

 

 

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.  

R.I.P. Barbara Love

Barbara Love, the subject of a substantial New York Times obituary earlier this week, died on February 13. The Times focuses on her prominence as a longtime lesbian activist but briefly mentions her role as an editor at the trade title Folio:, which many magazine people will also remember. Love was 85.

R.I.P. Ellen Levine

Ellen Levine, the longtime (and very gracious, in my experience) editor of Good Housekeeping magazine, died on Nov. 6 at age 79. Levine was, remarkably, the first female editor-in-chief in the magazine's 109-year history when she got the job in 1994, succeeding John Mack Carter.