Life, 1915-06-10 · page 10 of 48
Life — June 10, 1915 — page 10: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is an editorial essay by Edward S. Marlin titled "The Magazine," not primarily a political cartoon page. The silhouette illustrations lining the margins appear to be decorative vignettes of magazine office life and readers. The essay satirizes magazine publishing's tension between efficiency and quality. Marlin criticizes magazines run purely by office machinery and administrative systems, arguing they lose human touch and editorial judgment. He contrasts this with "ambitious" writers and editors who understand that magazines need human intuition, not just mechanization. He mocks the competitive race among publishers to maximize circulation and profit through mass production techniques, suggesting this compromises editorial integrity. The piece advocates for magazines retaining human editorial vision rather than becoming mere manufactured products. The silhouettes humorously illustrate various magazine workplace scenarios mentioned in the text.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
The Magazine By Edward S. Martin NCONSISTENCY, thy name is Magazine! But in this so changeful world who can blame the magazines for changing? There was a group that lived by the muckrake, but did its job so efficiently and dragged our civilization up to such a pinnacle of anxiety for improvement that people’s nerves got shaky, and they had to lay off their political stimulants, and muck-raking ceased to sell advertising space, and the muckrake magazines had to change. Of course the great success of the muckrake magazines, while it lasted, jolted the old-style, con- servative magazines pretty hard. First they were shocked to see the muckrakers run away from them and get too much of the public’s money, and were almost ready to declare that novelty is life. Then presently they were shocked again to see the muck- rakers aleak and begin to look down in the bow and try to shape new and safer courses. Then they were ready to proclaim that novelty is death and. political uplift is hell. One of them cheated Scylla and avoided Charybdis by expounding the non-polit- ical activities of a popular politician; another got aground and suffered salvage, and another set a resolute course towards the calm old seas of pure literature and illustration, and evolved a policy, to wit, to ignore contemporary events and minister quieting medicines to a world in convulsions, but without recording or admitting the convulsions. So far it seems to do well on those lines, but it is like a ship on a fixed course. It saves lots of trouble to run a magazine on a policy, but, after all, that is hardly navigation. . eee THe passion of our time is for doing things by machinery. The great aim of efficiency is to do away with the need to think. A writer said: “Sometimes I think writing is hard work!" His law-clerk son said: “Everything is hard work that you cannot organize so as to have some one else do it.” Mr. Walsh, the investigator, was quoted the other day as saying that he had got his law business so organized that it could be run by the young men in his office, so that he could give attention to public affairs, That is the ideal state, to have one’s busi- ness run by the office force, so that one can give attention to other matters. But a magazine, even if it has a policy, cannot long be run successfully by the office force. It is a pity, because an office force can be so beautifully per- fected. Typewriters and stenographers are clean, sober, self-sacrificing and efficient. An office force is a piece of machinery and can be made to work smoothly and with great power on appointed lines. A going magazine must have an efficient office force, but it must have something else, something that can keep it always connected with the wells that must feed its life. What an advertiser looks for in a magazine is circulation among people with money, but what a really ambitious writer looks for is understanding and, sometimes, direction, and that is something that no machine-made magazine can furnish. That is only to be had from a human being, an adventurer, alive, with like passions, imperfect in judgment but accessible to thoughts, not afraid to know what is doing in the world, not afraid of his subscribers, and not so fastened to a policy as not to know that what is wise to-day may be foolish to-morrow, and that what is dead to-day may be alive next month. eee T is the misery of ambitious magazines that they have to have these fallible, human-being editors. But for that, efficiency could rule in them and they could be manufactured in vast buildings and in huge quantities, just like soap or breakfast foods. Many of them are so manufactured as it is. If one is content to make merchandise in the magazine form and sell it, it can be done, and is done, profit- ably on a huge scale. Here is a country with a hun- dred million people in it, of whom about ninety-four per cent. can read by the time they are ten years old. And, apparently, they all want to read. And it is a country full of factories, merchandise, sellers of goods and mail-order houses. The distribution of magazines is furthered by the benevolence of a gov- ernment that has been taught to desire that the millions who have attained a tax-bought skill in deciphering print may not lose that skill for lack of enticing printed pages on which to practice it. So this is a very happy land for periodicals, the happiest magazine land in all the earth. Just to feed the eyes of the print-hungry and to suggest expenditures to the pecunious is a grand calling, and for a good many publishers it suffices. But others aspire to more than that, and yearn to hitch their Comicbooks.com