Magazine Distastes

From the Point of View of an Encyclopœdist

FRANK MOORE COLBY

I HAVE just now jotted down a list of the sort of things that magazine editors have told me, or told friends of mine, they do not wish to print. Before mentioning the subjects on my list I wish to give my reasons for believing that this is not a mere matter of literary or journalistic .shop but a matter of almost universal interest. My own experience has convinced me that almost any one sooner or later is likely to be concerned with the tastes of magazine editors. As I see the world, it is made up of two classes: people with something to print, and people whose advice is asked as to what should be done about it. I cannot explain my own experience on any other theory in respect to the composition of mankind.

I am repeatedly asked about the probable preferences of magazine editors by persons with manuscripts to place. And yet not only have I never in my life written a successful magazine article or fathomed the mind of a successful magazine editor, but I have pursued a profession peculiarly repulsive to magazine editors and to readers of magazines—a profession so repulsive that I hesitate in this place even to mention it. I have always been an encyclopaedia editor, an occupation popularly considered the coldest in the world.

This, by the way, is probably an exaggeration. I admit that it is a cool kind of editing, but I do not think it is the coldest, or even so cold as several kinds of editing that are considered comparatively warm. I would instance the editing of our humorous weekly publications. I have read many numbers of Life, for example, which made me feel that mine was after all quite a rollicking kind of editorial occupation, as editorial occupations now go. Collating the speeches of presidential candidates is another thing that rather warms me up when I think of it.

But there is no doubt that my relation as an encyclopaedia editor to any man who edits a successful magazine is an exceedingly cold one. I cannot imagine a colder. One page of my text would ruin his publication; one page of his text would ruin mine.

An Encyclopœdist's Desires

AS an encyclopaedist, for instance, I like, above all things, definiteness and permanence of information; an easy, pleasant and alphabetical continuity of narration, and a rich variety in the subjects of thought. I hate being jerked about from "Bolshevism and True Democracy", through an "Arizona Farm" to "Lloyd George as a Man". I see no reason why a magazine editor who begins with "Bolshevism" should not run on spontaneously, just as I always do, to "Bolster", which comes from the old English Bole and is a piece of wood covered with canvas and placed on the trestletree of a vessel for the eyes of the topmost rigging to rest upon, and then to Bolti, which is another name for Bultee, and then to the Bolton family, all dead but one, and so on. For me there is at any rate an alphabetical reason; for him there is no reason at all.

And, as an encyclopaedist, I take no interest in a magazine editor till he is dead and not much interest even then. From the point of view of an encyclopaedia every magazine editor is, of course, better dead, for you can then tell whether he amounts to anything. It all depends on his bibliography. If he leaves a decent bibliography, which he hardly ever does, you may notice him. While alive, he never says or does a thing that is worth mentioning. In fact, it is not respectable to mention him.

There are many brilliantly successful magazine editors whose names it would be just as improper for me to mention as it would be for them to include obscene or profane language in their magazines.

And, in respect to vivacity and permanence of interest, there is not one of the most brilliantly successful magazine editors who, from my point of view, can approach the very dullest of the digging beetles or the laziest and least successful of the fleas. On the other hand, anything that I may say on the subjects I delight in, from the river Aar, Aardwark, and Ab, down to and including Zygozoospores is, from their point of view, detestable.

I go into all these personal details simply for this reason. In a community where any of us may be asked at any moment by a young woman whether he thinks a short story about the rescue of three babies from a burning building by a clean-cut young man will please the editor of The Saturday Evening Post, I do not see how anybody can avoid being interested in the tastes of editors. People with manuscripts put these questions to everybody. Latterly, a number of maddened and desperate creatures, with all doors shut in their faces, and hounded off the streets, have asked my advice about their poems. I have referred them to the Superintendent of Public Documents at Washington (a professional colleague), as a literary man whose interests are closer than my own to the more passionate kind of publications.

Magazine policy is therefore a matter of interest to everybody. I believe it is also a mysterious matter to everybody, especially in respect to the subjects it deliberately excludes. Foremost on the average editor's blacklist is the entire range of subjects pertaining to politics and religion. I do not mean, of course, that all successful magazines exclude religion and politics and I am not referring to magazines restricted by their very nature to other fields. But it is sufficiently remarkable that certain highly successful magazines, supposedly general in their scope, do deliberately, and in advance, shut out any discussion of a religious or a political subject. The editor of one of them has put the thing so absolutely as to exclude any contribution within these fields from any intellect however colossal. Should there be an outcropping of political or religious geniuses, their contributions would be refused.

Now there is nothing in the nature of these or the other subjects on my black-list that could give you any clue to the reason for exclusion. If you guess in advance why things are excluded, you will almost certainly guess wrong. In fact, the editor's reason for excluding them is often the very reason why you would suppose he would wish to put them in. Take the interest of readers, for example. Offhand one would say that an editor would desire most to include the subjects which most interested the readers. Precisely the opposite is true of the most successful magazines in this country. Subjects are excluded because he fears they may interest readers too much. The fear of interesting the readers too much is a nightmare with certain editors. They will leave out subjects on which almost everybody in the world is dull and they will leave them out not in fear of dullness but in the fear of undue animation.

The Editor's Black List

THE subject of Woodrow Wilson, for example, is excluded from certain magazines, not,—as you would naturally suppose, because everyone is likely to be tedious about it, but because it is feared he will not be tedious enough. It is feared that subscribers will become too excited one way or another by what is said about Woodrow Wilson. Mary Baker Eddy is omitted not as rather a threadbare subject, but as a subject likely to exhilarate unduly or to inflame. The newer the idea and the more eloquent the writer, the more objectionable it would be. Prohibition must not be discussed in certain magazines by anybody or from any point of view. Among other things on the editorial black-list are: Elopement without Marriage; Radicalism of Any Description from a Radical Point of View; preference of one point of the compass in this country over another, as of the East over the West, the North over the South; anything of a humourous or ironical nature that cannot instantly be seized by two hundred thousand persons moving as one; and, of course, any ending of any narrative if it is not in the editorial sense "happy".

And the interdiction appears in many cases to be absolute. No matter how wonderfully or with what infinite tact a writer might do these things, the things are still forbidden. Nor are they admitted even though the expression of one point of view is offset at once by the expression of the opposite. You must not attack the Pope, even though a better man than you should rush to the Pope's defense in the next number—the theory being that all Catholic readers cancel their subscriptions after the first article, that all Protestant readers cancel theirs after the second article, and that none of them ever comes back. So you must never mention the Pope. You must never mention a cocktail. Though your anacreontic trifle about cocktails were offset on the next page by an Anti-Saloon thunderbolt, the damage would still be done, the 'dry' and 'wet' subscribers, successively alienated, refusing forever to be comforted. And so it goes, by careful steering along the line of complete irrelevance to the more active of the human interests, including specifically matters pertaining to God, man, woman, the state, property, love, wine, sorrow, and the insurgency of the human spirit.

Having as an encyclopaedic editor a body of readers remarkable for the catholicity of their interests—robust readers ready for anything, however dangerous, I must not criticize the editors of these successful magazines. No doubt they know their business. But it follows from the black-lists I have seen that subscribers are not like people in the world at large. The proportion of nervous invalids among them is much greater. Subscribers can only be kept alive by the concealment of thoughts to which they themselves are unaccustomed.

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One subscriber often cannot bear to hear how another subscriber is really feeling. And on many magazines vast bodies of subscribers will often scatter at the first approach of man,— like rabbits.