"She was both stimulating and repellent. She would have killed her own mother in cold blood if it would make for a good page in Bazaar." — photographer Erwin Blumenfeld on longtime Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow, quoted in the book "Vogue 100: A Century of Style."
Snow wrote a memoir, with Mary Louise Aswell, "The World of Carmel Snow," published posthumously in 1962 and is the subject of a 2005 biography, "A Dash of Daring," by Penelope Rowlands.
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"The profession of magazine editing is only too often an abortive attempt, on the part of a third-rate intellect, to gratify the intemperate curiosity of the Masses concerning problems with which they are wholly unfitted to cope, by administering to them, at fixed intervals, the ill-considered and disordered imaginings of a group of underpaid and irresponsible writers…"
— Vanity Fair magazine, in piece titled "How to Edit a Monthly Magazine," February 1917. This sounds a lot like Frank Crowninshield, who was the magazine's editor at the time.
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"No outsider can imagine the constant wear and tear on the nerves which is incidental to the conduct of a leading magazine…. Nine-tenths of the work of the magazine editor is to reject the laborious essays of men who have picked out his magazine as the conduit through which their thoughts shall issue to the world. The grief and rage which this rejection means cannot be understood unless one has himself filled the breach. We often hear of the indifference and the stony-hearted cynicism of the magazine editor, but probably there are few men in the world outside of railroad ticket offices and a few similar cages of badgered humanity who are kept so on the stretch by importunity and expostulation."
— The Washington, D.C., Evening Star reflecting on the recent resignation of Lorettus Sutton Metcalf as editor of The Forum magazine, March 19, 1891.
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"At the very start it's like any pregnancy. You feel the new life stirring inside you — it's quite exciting. Then you get the morning sickness and the pains in the back when things don't work out right." — Norman Cousins in 1972, reflecting on starting his new magazine World after 30-some years as editor of the Saturday Review.
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"Writers, it has been said (I may have been the one who said it), write not for general readers but for editors." — Essayist Joseph Epstein, in his 2024 memoir, "Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life."
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"Every author has his or her favorite horror story, usually involving the insertion of mistakes and infelicities that were not in the original. In fact, editing here [in the U.S.] has become rewriting; and rewriting of a very low standard." — the late Christopher Hitchens, writing (unless he was rewritten) in 1985.
The quote appears in the 2011 book "The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism."
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"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.
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"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.
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"The secret of editing a successful magazine is knowing your reader. At Cosmo, we get lots of stuff submitted that's really wonderful—but not right for us. Too many magazines stray too far. They try to get everybody, and that's not the way it works. Once you establish who you're after, you do everything to please that reader." — Helen Gurley Brown, late longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, quoted in USA Today in 1985.
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"As a general rule, don't talk a good game before you actually write, because then editors will expect more and be let down. Always tell editors how you're struggling, but you're sure you'll 'bring it together' and pull the fat out of the fire at the eleventh hour." — Frank Deford in his 2012 book, "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter." In addition to being a sportswriter, and a very good one, Deford edited The National, a short-lived but well regarded daily sports newspaper in the early 1990s.
While I didn't know the late Deford, I did see him in Grand Central from time to time and was always struck by his remarkable resemblance to the 1950s TV Western hero Yancy Derringer.
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"I print what I like." — Cosmopolitan editor Ray Long, reportedly the highest-paid editor of his day, in a Fortune magazine profile, 1931.
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"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.
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