The Humorous Side of an Editor’s Life, an article from The Ladies Home Journal, August 1907 issue, written by an anonymous editor.
THE first number of a magazine that I ever edited got me into trouble. This particular issue, my pride because it was my first, had not been issued two days before a man stopped his subscription to it. I didn’t blame him for that, exactly, except that he said I had insulted the memory of his wife.
I looked over the number and found I had published an article which referred to the inscription on his wife’s tombstone. The inscription read:
“Sarah Hackett: Lord, she was Thine.”
We had a very small printing-office; it happened that the compositor had run out of “e’s,”and he had to leave out an “e” somewhere, so he thought the safest “e” to omit was the last one — fatal choice!
Still worse was to come to me, however, from that fatal first magazine, when letters began to pour in on me from irate mothers-in-law, because I had printed in that same issue the story of the commercial traveler who received this telegram from his wife:
“Mother just died. Shall I embalm, cremate or bury?”
And the man sent this answer:
“Embalm, cremate and bury. Take no chances.”
I was fortunate in comparison with a friend of mine, however, the editor of a humorous weekly, who lost the subscriptions of more than fifty women, who were mothers-in-law, after one of his early numbers, because he published the joke of a man who wrote this note to his doctor:
My dear Doctor:
My mother-in-law is at death’s door. Will you come quickly and pull her through?
I HAD always believed that many of the questions and answers printed in the average woman’s magazine were “made up”in the office, until early in my experience I received this note from a young woman, who certainly was in trouble:
“I have become engaged to a very worthy young man, and we have fixed upon a day next month for our wedding. Now, what is the proper time for us to get my parents’ consent to our engagement?”
I was always sorry I did not have the same skill to answer that letter as Henry Ward Beecher once showed in answering the following letter that came to him one Monday morning:
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.
Dear Sir:I journeyed over from my New York hotel this morning to hear you preach, expecting, of course, to hear an exposition of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead I heard a political harangue, with no reason or cohesion in it. You made an ass of yourself.
Very truly yours,
“That’s to the point,” commented Mr. Beecher with a smile, and then, turning the sheet over, he wrote:
My dear Sir:
I am sorry you should have taken so long a journey to hear Christ preached, and then heard what you are polite enough to call a ‘political harangue.’ I am sorry, too, that you think I made an ass of myself. In this connection I have but one consolation: that you didn’t make an ass of yourself. The Lord saved you that trouble.
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
A WESTERN school-teacher once wrote that she had asked each boy in her class to write an original story on a subject of his own choosing. The teacher had promised that each story was to be read aloud by her to her class, and the best should be published. Would the editor publish the best? He replied that he thought he would. Here is the story. It was written by a boy of nine, please remember, and was called:
Virtue has Its Own Reward
A poor young man fell in love with the daughter of a rich lady who kept a candy shop. The poor young man could not marry the rich candy-lady’s daughter because he had not money enough to buy furniture.
A wicked man offered to give the young man twenty-five dollars if he would become a drunkard. The young man wanted the money very much, so he could marry the rich candy-lady’s daughter, but when he got to the saloon he turned to the wicked man and said: ‘I will not become a drunkard, even for great riches.’
And as he turned around to go home he saw lying on the sidewalk a pocketbook containing a million dollars in gold. Then the young lady consented to marry him.
They had a beautiful wedding, and the next day they had twins.
THE stories of the prices paid to authors by the magazines—that is, according to the newspapers (and there is, I may add, a vast difference between the figures in these newspaper stories and the actual prices paid) — sometimes lead to a humorous turn.
A story went the rounds of the newspapers once that I had paid Mr. Rudyard Kipling $10,000 for one short story containing two thousand words. A man reading this paragraph wrote to Mr. Kipling and said that, as he understood he received five dollars a word for everything he wrote, he inclosed five dollars and would Mr. Kipling kindly send him one word? Mr. Kipling did. He sent him a card, and written on it was the one word: “Thanks.”
One day the receiving teller in the bank where John Kendrick Bangs deposits his superfluous wealth said to the author: “I see by the papers, Mr. Bangs, that you receive one hundred dollars for every poem that you write.” “Oh, yes!” answered Bangs, “but they’re not worth it; do you think so?” “Indeed I do,” answered the bank-teller heartily, who happened to be an admirer. “Do you, indeed?” meditatively answered the author. The next day Mr. Bangs walked into the bank .and handed the teller his book with ten poems in it, and a deposit slip calling for a deposit of one thousand dollars.
A POPULAR notion of an editor is that he does practically everything; that he is responsible for everything about a magazine: text, pictures, advertisements, or even the prompt delivery of the magazine; so that no matter what goes wrong there is only one thing to do —go for the editor.
I remember one day, while leaving our building, meeting on the pavement a lady who seemed to be very much disturbed in mind. She wanted to see the owner of the magazine. I told her the building was closed and the owner had gone home. Could I do anything for her? Yes, I could; she had come to see the owner and personally make a complaint against the editor. Of course that interested me, and I assured her that if she would tell me her trouble I would report the matter and see that the editor was properly disciplined.
“Well,” she said, “he ought to be.” And then the facts came out. In the house in which she resided lived another family with which her family were “not at all on good terms,” and so, whenever her magazine was delivered at her house, unless the bell was rung twice the lady of the other family would go down and get the magazine, and then, of course, there was trouble! “And would you believe it,” she said, “I have told your editor now three times that whenever he delivers the magazine at our house that he must ring the bell twice. And yet he persists in ringing it only once.”
A FEW years ago I was advertised to speak in a certain city. A dear old lady called upon the Chief of Police and asked that I be arrested the moment of my arrival at the station. She explained that a year before I had called at her house to solicit a subscription to my magazine: she had entertained me at her house for a week, taken me to the houses of all her friends, and I had promised her and each of her friends, in addition to a subscription, a set of nineteen volumes of books!
Another popular notion is that an editor knows so much that it actually hurts him to carry his knowledge around. One woman not long ago very strangely doubted the fact that editors knew as much as they were represented to know. She decided to herself that she could catch an editor napping, and, unfortunately for me, she picked me out as the one to be caught.
Hence it was on a certain day that I read a manuscript that filled me with sheer delight. For a long time I had not read a manuscript that appealed to me so strongly, expressed such sensible views, and was so extremely well written. I wrote the sender a most complimentary letter, sent a check and published the article. The issue containing it had not been published more than a day or two when I received a letter from a man who said that the article had a strangely familiar ring to it and that he had read the article before. And to prove that he was right he inclosed the same article published in another magazine fifteen years before, written by myself!
THE difficulty that some authors have in getting their brain-products into the magazines tends to some very funny experiences. It was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that he could not understand why people found this trouble in getting into the magazines. He said he went across the ocean, and the very first day out he became a contributor to the Atlantic!
Now, the young author is convinced that one reason he cannot get into the magazines is because the editors do not read his manuscripts. He, or she, is convinced that only the manuscripts which have famous names attached to them are read; that the magazines are run by cliques, and only the personal friends of the editors can gain access to their pages. There are thousands of authors who believe this, because they have proved it.
Take the author who, before he sends his manuscript to the editor, carefully puts page forty-one next to page nineteen, and the manuscript comes back to him exactly that way. Or the other author who takes two pages of his manuscript and glues them together! Or another author who carefully puts a piece of beautiful ribbon between two pages, and the ribbon is still there when she receives her manuscript back! These tests are proof positive. I remember one instance where the author made a still more positive test. She sent a long serial story and explained that, as a test whether or not her manuscript would be read, she left out every “a,” “the,” “and” and “to.” The editor was to insert these in their proper places as proof that the manuscript was read!
ON THE other hand, the editor claims that manuscripts are read. Yet, when an editor says this, there invariably springs to the mind of the young author that little couplet:
“I dreamed I slept in an editor’s bed,
When the editor was not nigh,
And I thought as I lay in that downy couch,
How easy editors lie!”
Of course, no editor will claim, I think, that every line of every manuscript is read. That isn’t necessary, any more than you have to eat all of a bad egg to find out that it isn’t good. There are indications sometimes that save much trouble. For example, when a story begins in this way:
A bright tear glistened in the moonlight as it fell below on the woodbine and honeysuckle that had twined and still were twining each other’s self around each one’s own self as they climbed life’s ladder together.
Then there are times when stories begin in such a tragic manner that there is no one left at the end. Here is the way one recent story began:
“Looking the very likeness of a wounded queen, Louise arose from whence she had been seated. Her face was deathly pale, as white as snow. With a look that will never be forgotten she turned her eyes full upon her father, and said in a queenly voice that sounded as of the grave: ‘Father, I can’t marry Mr. Walton; I just can’t!’ She reeled, fell into a heap in the chair whence she had arisen—and was dead.
At that moment Clarence rushed into the room, and, seeing the dead form of his beloved, he shot eyes of fire at the quivering form of the bereaved father before him, and said: ‘Murderer, you have killed her,’ and before he could be stopped a pistol-shot rang out upon the air and the father fell beside his daughter’s body, while a quick pulsation of the heart took possession of the distracted mother, and she remained sitting dead in her chair.
Maddened with the sight before him, Clarence rushed out of the room, and when morning broke his crushed body was found at the foot of the stairs.
This was all in the first two pages of the manuscript: what happened in the succeeding forty-odd pages I never had the heart to find out.
ONCE in a while something will happen which makes an editor disinclined to read a manuscript, as in the case of a young lawyer who wrote stories for Harper’s Magazine.
One day he sent his office-boy to the Harpers’ office with a manuscript carefully done up, and with a note, separate from the package, addressed to one of the Harpers. Anxious that there be no mistake, he explained carefully to the boy what the package and the letter contained. A day or two later he received his manuscript back with a curt note from the firm, asking that no more manuscripts be submitted to them. Amazed, he put on his hat and went immediately down to see Mr. Harper.
“What in the world do you mean by such a note as this?” he asked.
“Just what it says,” answered Mr. Harper. “We prefer not to receive any more such letters from you as the last.” “What was the matter with it?” asked the lawyer. “Matter?” echoed Mr. Harper. “Suppose you read your letter once more.”
So the letter was produced, and then the truth came out. The office-boy had lost the note on the way, and, knowing the general purport of it, had composed a note of his own as a substitute, and signed the young lawyer’s name. It read this way:
Dear Mr. Hopper:
Here is a manuscrap. Read it.
If you want it, keep it. If you don’t want it, send it back, any go to thunder.”
IT HAS become a common practice to criticize the contents of the modern magazine, but there is another side to this question, which I ask magazine readers to bear in mind — that the next time they are inclined to criticize a magazine for what they see in it, they might remember, with gratitude, the things that are not in it!
The manuscripts submitted would be beyond the belief of some of the readers of magazines. For instance, not long ago a manuscript called “Woman” came into the editorial office of a well-known woman’s magazine, and here is the way it began:
Woman! What is woman? Rather, should we not ask: What is she not? Fair woman! Is there anything she is not? Beautiful woman! What has she not done? Nothing.
And soon, and in this particular case it went on for twenty-eight pages.
Consider, for a moment, the fond parents who send editors the literary efforts of their children that the editor is told “are so cute.” Here is an extract, for instance, from a boy’s composition on Queen Elizabeth:
“Queen Elizabeth was very beautiful and clever; she had a red head and freckles. She was a virgin queen, and she never married. She was so fond of dresses that she was never seen without one on.”
NOT long ago a story came to one of the magazines that was intended to compete for a thousand-dollar prize.
The author explained in a letter that the story was very thrilling; “perhaps too thrilling,” she said. If it was she could modify the thrilling part. And it thrilled right from the start, for this is the way it began:
“Gwendolyn Roberts, fair and beautiful as a goddess, stood before her cheval glass.
She was clasping her beautiful head of golden hair between her hands, when suddenly she started. With a cry full of despair, she gave one shriek: ‘My God, what have I done? What have I done?’ She had swallowed her engagement ring!”
The author went on to tell that, of course, a doctor was hastily called, the proper remedy was applied, the ring rescued, and the story ends by Gwendolyn’s marrying the doc tor who rescued the ring!
THIS letter recently came to an editor, and he paled as he read it:
Dear Sir:
For twenty-five years I have been steadily writing on a manuscript which I have now finished. When I started on it it was with the idea of writing a simple story. But the great problem involved in it took such hold of me that, unconsciously, the story grew and grew until 1 began to realize, one day, that under my pen was growing one of the world’s masterpieces of literature. So for twenty-five years I have kept on and on. and now my task is ended, and I am ready to give my masterpiece to the world. I send it to you, not by mail, because it would cost too much: not by express, because it is loo precious. So it goes to you by freight!
And it came—by freight: a box that staggered the editor I The manuscript had at least one distinction: that it was the largest manuscript ever received by that magazine. It contained four hundred thousand words, and it was called “Love.”
A GIRL not long ago wrote this to an editor of one of the magazines:
Our minister, who is a very smart man, thinks that this poetry is very good. He says it is as good as some which Mrs. Browning wrote in Portuguese. But as I have never been in Portugal I never read what this lady wrote. But all my friends say that this is my very best poem. I tell you this because you may be too busy to see its fineness right away.
The kind of poetry that the magazine prints is another source of complaint with its readers. I wonder if they would like this kind better:
The Girl He Loved
Oh, she was a lovely girl,
So pretty and so fair,
With gentle, lovelit eyes,
And wavy, dark-brown hair.I loved the gentle girl.
But, oh! I heaved a sigh
When first she told me she could see
Out of only one eye.But soon I thought within myself,
I’d better save my tear and sigh.
To bestow upon some I know,
Who has more than one eye.Ah, no, I need not pity her,
She needs not my tear and sigh,
She makes good use, I tell you,
Of her one remaining eye.”
SOME time ago a love story was written that was a classic of its kind — no doubt of that. It was the love story of one Miss Lidie Meaks. The story started out to describe the hero in this way:
He was a tall, commanding man, with a gracefully flowing mustache, aquiline nose, evenly set teeth, mobile chin, high forehead, and the elongated corners of his dark eyes stretched away under dark brows around fair temples, from which beautiful black hair retreated above his ears.
But the author’s description of the heroine is even more graphic:
She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium-sized, elegant figure, wearing a neatly-fitted traveling dress of black alpaca. Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful crown.
Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a timekeeper of the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was destined to be pushed forward by sighs.
Then comes the great love scene of the story:
“Ah, Miss Lidie, how can you drive such love as mine front its mortal habitation and leave my bosom empty with all but wondering pain? Your sweet words dropping like vocal roses from the gardens of language heighten the joy of the thought that you are soon to be mine. My heart is thirsty, and you are its living fountain. Let me drink of your fair lips and water a desert that will soon flourish like the green bay-tree and the balm of Gilead.’ And he prostrated his handsome form upon the ground at her beautiful feet.
That was too much for Miss Lidie, for the author says:
Then Miss Lidie cried out: ‘Oh, God! pardon the weakness of woman,’ and burying her face in his bosom her lachrymal lakes overflowed and anointed his garments with drops that were to him the myrrh of the soul, while his beautiful arms shot out and encircled her dovelike neck.”
So you see, gentle reader, there is a humorous side to an editor’s life!