The editor has, therefore, no means of finding it out aforehand by putting his ear to the ground.  Only by the simplest rules of psychology can he edit rightly so that he may lead, and to the average editor of to-day, it is to be feared, psychology is a closed book.  His mind is all too often focussed on the circulation and advertising, and all too little on the intangibles that will bring to his periodical the results essential in these respects.

The editor is the pivot of a magazine.  On him everything turns.  If his gauge of the public is correct, readers will come:  they cannot help coming to the man who has something to say himself, or who presents writers who have.  And if the reader comes, the advertiser must come.  He must go where his largest market is:  where the buyers are.  The advertiser, instead of being the most difficult factor in a magazine proposition, as is so often mistakenly thought, is, in reality, the simplest.  He has no choice but to advertise in the successful periodical.  He must come along.  The editor need never worry about him.  If the advertiser shuns the periodical’s pages, the fault is rarely that of the advertiser:  the editor can generally look for the reason nearer home.

One of Edward Bok’s first acts as editor was to offer a series of prizes for the best answers to three questions he put to his readers:  what in the magazine did they like least and why; what did they like best and why; and what omitted feature or department would they like to see installed?  Thousands of answers came, and these the editor personally read carefully and classified.  Then he gave his readers’ suggestions back to them in articles and departments, but never on the level suggested by them.  He gave them the subjects they asked for, but invariably on a slightly higher plane; and each year he raised the standard a notch.  He always kept “a huckleberry or two” ahead of his readers.  His psychology was simple:  come down to the level which the public sets and it will leave you at the moment you do it.  It always expects of its leaders that they shall keep a notch above or a step ahead.  The American public always wants something a little better than it asks for, and the successful man, in catering to it, is he who follows this golden rule.

CHAPTER XIII

BUILDING UP A MAGAZINE

Edward Bok has often been referred to as the one “who made The Ladies’ Home Journal out of nothing,” who “built it from the ground up,” or, in similar terms, implying that when he became its editor in 1889 the magazine was practically non-existent.  This is far from the fact.  The magazine was begun in 1883, and had been edited by Mrs. Cyrus H. K. Curtis, for six years, under her maiden name of Louisa Knapp, before Bok undertook its editorship.  Mrs. Curtis had laid a solid foundation of principle and policy for the magazine: