When editors were gods

One well-known writer/editor's advice for managing editors' expectations

"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.

One editor’s five-word formula for success

"I print what I like." — Cosmopolitan editor Ray Long, reportedly the highest-paid editor of his day, in a Fortune magazine profile, 1931.

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.

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."

Robert Gottlieb on the 'noble' profession of editing

"I don’t like writing. I hate writing, I never wanted to be a writer. I think it's an ignoble profession. As opposed to editing, which is a noble profession because it's a service profession. Whom are you serving when you write? Yourself, your ego. No, no, no. Editing is a noble profession." — Robert Gottlieb, in his acceptance speech on receiving the inaugural Editorial Excellence Award from the Biographers International Organization in 2014.

(I was there and believe he was at least sort of kidding.)

Gottlieb, who died this past June, was best-known as a book editor, especially for the acclaimed biographies of Robert A. Caro, but also did a stint as editor of The New Yorker, from 1987 to 1992.

Mark Twain draws a distinction betwen editors and God Almighty

"Any editor to whom I submit my manuscripts has an undisputed right to delete anything to which he objects, but God Almighty Himself has no right to put words in my mouth that I never used!" — an irate Mark Twain complaining to the editors of St. Nicholas magazine about their handling of material from his book "Tom Sawyer Abroad."

The quote comes from illustrator Dan Beard's 1939 autobiography, "Hardly a Man Is Now Alive." Beard writes that he wasn't present for Twain's outburst but heard about it from several staffers.

 

Even more intimidating than presidents or movie stars

"A writer may never find himself intimidated by governors or even presidents, by tycoons or even movie stars, for he knows he has the power to write about them. But editors have the power to pass on his writing." — Meyer Levin in his 1973 nonfiction book, "The Obsession."

Levin is probably best remembered today as the author of "Compulsion," a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder case.