THE very term “literary editor” is a survival. It is meaningless, but we continue to use it because no better designation has been found, just as people in monarchical countries continue to speak of “King George” or “Queen Victoria of Spain.” Besides, there is politeness to consider. No one wants to be the first to allude publicly and truthfully to “Figurehead George” or “Social Leader Victoria.”
Literary editors who are literary are not editors, and literary editors who are editors are no longer literary. Of old there were scholarly, sarcastic men (delightful fellows, personally) who sat in cubbyholes and read unremittingly. Afterward, at night, they set down a few thoughtful, biting words about what they had read. These were printed. Publishers who perused them felt as if knives had been stuck in their backs. Booksellers who read them looked up to ask each other pathetically: “But what does it mean?” Book readers who read them resolved that the publication of a new book should be, for them, the signal to read an old one. It was good for the secondhand trade.
We’ve changed all that, or, if we haven’t, we’re going to. Take a chap who runs what is called a “book section.” This is a separate section or supplement forming part of a daily or Sunday newspaper. Its pages are magazine size—half the size of newspaper pages. They number from eight to twenty-eight, depending on the season and the advertising. The essential thing to realize about such a section is that it requires an editor to run it.
It does not require a literary man, or woman, at all. The editor of such a section need have no special education in the arts or letters. He must have judgment, of course, and if he has not some taste for literary matters he may not enjoy his work as he will if he has that taste. But high-browism is fatal.
Can our editor “review” a book? Perhaps not. It is no matter. Maybe he knows a good review when he sees it, which will matter a good deal. Maybe he can get capable people to deal with the books for him. Which will matter more than anything else on earth in the handling of his book section.
A section will most certainly require, to run it, a man who can tell a good review (another word-survival) and who can get good reviewers. It will require a man, or woman, with a sharp, clear and very broad viewpoint. Such exist. What do we mean—viewpoint?
The right conception, it seems to us, starts with the proposition that a new book is news (sometimes an old one is news too) and should be dealt with as such. Perhaps, we are dealing only with a state of mind, in all this, but states of mind are important. They are the only states where self-determination is a sure thing. To get on:
Your literary editor is like unto a city editor, an individual whose desk is usually not so far away but that you can study him in his habitat. The city editor tries to distinguish the big news from the little news. The literary editor will wisely do the same. What is big news in the world of books? Well, a book that appears destined to be read as widely fifty years hence as it is to-day on publication is big news. And a book that will be read immediately by 100,000 people is bigger news. People who talk about news often overlook the ephemeral side of it. Much of the newsiness and importance of news resides in its transiency. What is news to-day isn’t news to-morrow. But to-day 100,000 people, more or less, will want to know about it.
Illustration: Two events happen on the same day. One of them will be noted carefully in histories written fifty years hence, but it affects, and interests, at the hour of its occurrence very few persons. Of course it is news, but there may easily, at that hour, be much bigger. For another event occurring on that same day, though of a character which will make it forgotten fifty years later, at once and directly affects the lives of the hundred thousand.
Parallel: Two books are published on the same day. One of them will be dissected fifty years later by the H. W. Boyntons and Wilson Folletts of that time. But the number of persons who will read it within the twelvemonth of its birth is small—in the hundreds. The other book will be out of print and unremembered in five years. But within six months of its publication hundreds of thousands will read it. Among those hundreds of thousands there will be hundreds, and maybe thousands, whose thoughts, ideas, opinions will be seriously modified and in some cases lastingly modified—whose very lives may change trend as a result of reading that book.
No need to ask which event and which book is the bigger news. News is not the judgment of posterity on a book or event. News is not even the sum total of the effects of an event or a book on human society. News is the immediate importance, or interest, of an event or a book to the greatest number of people.
Eleanor H. Porter writes a new story. One in every thousand persons in the United States, or perhaps more, wants to know about it, and at once. Isidor MacDougal (as Frank M. O’Brien would say) writes a literary masterpiece. Not one person in 500,000 cares, or would care even if the subject matter were made comprehensible to him. The oldtime “reviewer” would write three solid columns about Isidor MacDougal’s work. The present-day literary editor puts it in competent hands for a simplified description to be printed later; and meanwhile he slaps Mrs. Porter’s novel on his front page.
The troubles of a literary editor are the troubles of his friend up the aisle, the city editor. The worst of them is the occasional and inevitable error in giving out the assignment. All his reporters are good book reporters, but like the people on the city editor’s staff they have usually their limitations, whether temperamental or knowledgeable. Every once in a while the city editor sends to cover a fire a reporter who does speechified dinners beautifully but who has no sympathy with fires, who can’t get through the fire lines, who writes that the fire “broke out” and burns up more words misdescribing the facts than the copyreader can extinguish with blue air and blue pencil. Just so it will happen in the best regulated literary editor’s sanctum that, now and then, the editor will give the wrong book to the right man. Then he learns how unreasonable an author can be, if he doesn’t know already from the confidences of publishers.
The literary editor’s point of view, we believe, must be that so well expressed by Robert Cortes Holliday in the essay on That Reviewer “Cuss” in the book Walking-Stick Papers. Few books that get published by established publishing houses are so poor or so circumscribed as not to appeal to a body of readers somewhere, however small or scattered. The function of the book reporter is transcendently to find a book’s waiting audience. If he can incidentally warn off those who don’t belong to that audience, so much the better. That’s a harder thing to do, of course.
2
The first requisite in a good book section is that it shall be interesting. As regards the news of new books, this is not difficult where book reporters, with the reporter’s attitude, are on the job. Reporter’s stories are sometimes badly written, but they are seldom dull. New books described by persons who have it firmly lodged in their noodles that they are “reviewing” the books, fare badly. The reviewer-obsession manifests itself in different ways. Sometimes the new book is made to march past the reviewer in column of squads, deploying at page 247 into skirmish formation and coming at page 431 into company front. Very fine, but the reader wants to see them in the trenches, or, headed by the author uttering inspiriting yells, going over the top. On other occasions the reviewer assumes the so-called judicial attitude, the true inwardness of which William Schwenk Gilbert was perhaps the first to appreciate, with the possible exception of Lewis Carroll. Then doth our reviewer tell us what will be famous a century hence. Much we care what will be famous a century hence. What bothers us is what we shall read to-morrow. Of course it may happen to be one and the same book. Very well then, why not say so?
The main interest of the book section is served by getting crackajack book reporters. They will suffice for the people who read the section because they are interested in books. If the literary editor stops there, however, he might as well never have started. These people would read the book section anyway, unless it were filled throughout with absolutely unreadable matter, as has been known to happen. Even then they would doubtless scan the advertisements. At least, that is the theory on which publishers hopefully proceed. There are book sections where the contributors always specify that their articles shall have a position next to advertising matter.
No, the literary editor must interest people who do not especially care about books as such. He can do it only by convincing them that books are just as full of life and just as much a part of a normal scheme of life as movies, or magazine cut-outs, or buying things on the instalment plan. Many a plain person has been led to read books by the fact that books are sometimes sold for instalment payments. Anything so sold, the ordinary person at once realizes, must be something which will fit into his scheme of existence. Acting on an instinct so old that its origin is shrouded in the mists of antiquity, the ordinary person pays the instalments. As a result, books are delivered at his residence. At first he is frightened. But he who looks and runs away may live to read another day. And from living to read it is but a step to reading to live.
Now one way to interest people who don’t care about books for books’ sake is to get up attractive pages, with pleasant or enticing headlines, with pictures, with jokes in the corners of ’em, with some new and original and not-hitherto-published matter in them, with poetry (all kinds), with large type, with signed articles so that the reader can know who wrote it and like or hate him with the necessary personal tag. But these things aren’t literary, at all. They are just plain human and fall in the field of action of every editor alive—though of course editors who are dead are exempt from dealing with them. That is why a literary editor has no need to be literary and, indeed, had better not be if it is going to prevent his being human.
We have been talking about the literary editor of a book section. There are not many book sections in this country. There are hundreds of book pages—half-pages and whole pages and double pages. The word “technique” is a loathsome thing and really without any significance in this connection, inasmuch as there is no particular way of doing the news of books well, and certainly no one way of doing it that is invariably better than any other. But for convenience we may permit ourselves to use the word “technique” for a moment; and, permission granted, we will merely say that the technique of a book page or pages is entirely different from the technique of a book section—if you know what we mean.
Clarified (we hope) it comes down to this, that things which a fellow would attempt in a book section he would not essay in a book page or double page. Conversely, things that will make a page successful may be out of place in a section. It is by no means wholly a matter of newspaper makeup, though there is that to it, too. But a man with a book section, though not necessarily more ambitious, is otherwisely so. For one thing, he expects to turn his reporters loose on more books than his colleague who has only a page or so to turn around in. For another, he will probably want to print a careful list of all books he receives, of whatever sort, with a description of each as adequate as he can contrive in from twenty to fifty words, plus title, author, place of publication, publisher and price. Such lists are scanned by publishers, booksellers, librarians, readers in search of books on special subjects—by pretty nearly everybody who reads the section at all. Even the rather prosaic quality of such a list has its value. A woman down in Texas writes to the literary editor that there is too much conscious cleverness in lots of the stuff he prints, “but the lists of books are delightful”! There you are. In editing a book section you must be all things to all women.
The fellow with a page or two has quite other preoccupations. Where’s a photo, or a cartoon? Must have a headline to break the solidity of this close-packed column of print. How about a funny column? That gifted person, Heywood Broun, taking charge of the book pages of the New York Tribune, announces that he is in favor of anything that will make book reviewing exciting. Nothing can make book reviewing exciting except book reporting and the books themselves; but if Broun is looking for excitement he will find it while filling the rôle of a literary editor. Before long he will learn that everybody in the world who is not the author of a book wants to review books—and some who are authors are willing to double in both parts. Also, a considerable number of books are published annually in these still United States and a considerable percentage of those published find their way to the literary editor. It is no joke to receive, list with descriptions and sort out for assignment or non-assignment an average of 1,500 volumes a year, nor to assign to your book reporters, with as much infallibility in choosing the reporter as possible, perhaps half of the 1,500. Likewise there are assignments which several reporters want, a single book bespoken by four persons, maybe; and there are book assignments that are received with horror or sometimes with unflinching bravery by the good soldier. To hand a man, for instance, the extremely thick two-volume History of Labour in the United States by Professor Commons and his associates is like pinning a decoration on him for limitless valor under fire—only the decoration bears a strong resemblance to the Iron Cross.
3
Advertising?
Newspapers depend upon advertising for their existence, let alone their profits, in most instances. Of course, if there were no such things as advertisements we should still have newspapers. The news must be had. Presumably people would simply pay more for it, or pay as much in a more direct way.
What is true of newspapers is true of parts of newspapers. The fact that a new book is news, and, as such, a thing that must more or less widely but indispensably be reported, is attested by the maintenance of book columns and pages in many newspapers where book advertising there is none. The people who read the Boston Evening Transcript, for example, would hardly endure the abolition of its book pages whether publishers used them to advertise in or not.
At the same time the publisher finds, and can find, no better medium than a good live book page or book section; nor can he find any other medium, nor can any other medium be created, in which his advertising will reach his full audience. “The trade” reads the excellent Publishers’ Weekly, librarians have the journal of the American Library Association, readers have the newspapers and magazines of general circulation on which they rely for the news of new books. But the good book page or book section reaches all these groups. Publishers, authors, booksellers, librarians, book buyers—all read it. And if it is really good it spreads the book-reading habit. Even a bookshop seldom does that—we have one exception in mind, pretty well known. People do not, ordinarily, read in a bookshop.
Of course a literary editor who has any regard for the vitality of his page or section is interested in book advertising. There’s something wrong with him if he isn’t. If he isn’t he doesn’t measure up to his job, which is to get people to read books and find their way about among them. A book page or a book section without advertising is no more satisfactory than a man or a woman without a sense of the value of money. It looks lopsided and it is lopsided. Readers resent it, and rightly. It’s a beautiful façade, but the side view is disappointing.
The interest the literary editor takes in book advertising need no more be limited than the interest he takes in the growth or improvement of any other feature of his page or section. It has and can have no relation to his editorial or news policy. The moment such a thing is true his usefulness is ended. An alliance between the pen and the pocketbook is known the moment it is made and is transparent the moment it takes effect in print. A literary editor may resent, and keenly, as an editor, the fact that Bing, Bang & Company do not advertise their books in his domain. He is quite right to feel strongly about it. It has nothing to do with his handling of the Bing Bang books. That is determined by their news value alone. He may give the Bing Bang best seller a front page review and at the same time decline to meet Mr. Bing or lunch with Mr. Bang. And he will be entirely honest and justified in his course, both ways. Puff & Boom advertise like thunder. The literary editor likes them both immensely, or, at least, he appreciates their good judgment (necessarily it seems good to him in his rôle as editor of the pages they use). But Puff & Boom’s books are one-stick stories. Well, it’s up to Puff & Boom, isn’t it?
Oh, well, first and last there’s a lot to being a literary editor, new style. But first and last there’s a lot to being a human. Any one who can be human successfully can do the far lesser thing much better than any literary editor has yet done it.