As founder of the Ladies' Home Journal and publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, Cyrus H. K. Curtis did as much to build the magazine into a mass medium as any man in American journalism. Called the Henry Ford of the magazine business, Curtis made no pretense of being either a journalist or an editor. Instead, he was an innovator who brought new techniques and ideas to magazine journalism in order to sell a product. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he did more, according to Oswald Garrison Villard, "to mechanize and standardize the public mind of America than any other man." He did so by hiring good editors and letting them edit. Once asked what he did at Curtis Publishing Company if he did not edit his magazines, Curtis responded, "I edit the editors." However, Edward W. Bok, his biographer and son-in-law, who was editor...