Life — June 10, 1915 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“LIFE* trade wagon to a star and bring some other forms of first-aid besides patterns and pudding receipts to an infant civilization. For this sort an office force is not enough. They have to have editors. ees ND what a sorrow an editor is to any magazine that aims at self-support! Instead of being a reliable mechanism, replaceable from the factory in case of breakage, he is something liable to every human casualty; liable to come late to the office, to get drunk, to fall in love, to be a crank and take up with a movement, to lose his nerve, to lose his sense of proportion, to lose his humility and have delusions of grandeur, to imagine himself a better writer than his writers, and a longer head than his publisher. Instead of being all things to all men which is his calling, he may want all men to be all things to him. He may be vain and per- petually intrude himself into the picture, and prac- tice all the time to advertise himself whereas his office is to advertise others and to be dragged re- luctant once in a while out of the background where he belongs because something has made a careless world realize that he is there. Any kind of delusion about himself and any defect in habits is pardonable in a writer if only sometime in the course of the day or of the week he can and does produce good reading. Quite otherwise with editors, who are expected to maintain during all their work- ing hours a high level of intelligence, patience, hospitality to suggestion and susceptibility to the pulsations of latent talent. Of course editors fall short of expectations, except a few, unknown, whose surviving publications are their monument; nevertheless, all ambitious maga- zines feel the need of having them. Magazines can- not carry ideas continuously to the people unless there are ideas in some mind that directs them. They cannot preach unless somewhere in their direc- tion is a feeling for the faith, nor print literature unless to some mind behind them literature is some- thing more than “ goods”. eee IRCULATION to a magazine is like feet to a dancer. He cannot dance without them, but he cannot dance well if he watches them. A maga- zine that aims to satisfy its circulation is lost, and the more circulation it has the more hopelessly lost it is. It must dance with its head and its soul and all its body, and let its feet find their own foot- ing. It must be what it must, and get such circula- tion as belongs to what it is. Some magazines have a circulation, and in other cases the circulation has the magazine. The editor of a periodical said to a contributor last year: “We have a large circulation and have to be careful. There are seven persons in the office who read all proofs and report all passages that seem to them liable to offend our readers.” That editor thinks his publication does good, and, to be sure, it may do something for entertainment. But no publication whose sole aim is to say what its readers expect to have said is of any high use to them. The publica- tion that is of some use is the one that can persuade its readers to think something they did not think before. If it can give them knowledge, it is some- thing, though knowledge abounds and they can get a great deal from the newspapers if they are skilled in selecting it. But if it can give them a new atti- tude of mind, get them to move around and sce something from a new standpoint, so that it looks different, that is really an important service. eee iv is better business to aim your magazine at people who don’t think, because there are more of them, It is an easier job, too, and can be organized by clever people who understand it so that it almost takes care of itself. But it seems a dull employment, though not duller than most commercial employ- ments, and capable, like them, of being transfigured by its incidents. But to aim your magazine at people who think is always a sporting proposition, and pref- erable to ordinary commerce because it is so much gayer. People are as willing to pay for sport, if they like it, as for anything else. Our people pay lavishly for baseball, movies, theatrical shows and rum, all of them forms of diversion. Thinking is the most fun of all, and financial support can be diverted to it from those other diversions by vendors of it who go about their business with the requisite skill and bring suitable wares to their market. eee THE magazines keep changing all the time accord- ing as the minds change that direct them. Hap- pily there are always some that are in a state of grace and willing to print almost any kind of a good piece if it can get written. The policies of those that have policies differ, and just as remark- able children are sometimes born of perverse parents, so excellent pieces are liable to break out into print in perverse magazines, With such a variety of more or less solvent magazines as we have now it is, hap- pily, impossible to get them all standardized and fitted with policies so that office forces can run them. If a writer cannot penetrate with his message the magazine that serves the readers he wants, he can sometimes, by taking another vehicle, reach those whom he did not want, and, maybe, find that he has come to his own. 1035