Names are not purely functional; they give substance to feelings and ideas that might otherwise remain intangible and they reflect social values, both cultural and monetary. This chapter considers the nature of editingâs invisibility, traces patterns in names and metaphors and offers a new working definition.
Gaps in Knowledge
The premise of this book is that editing is a significant aspect of human communication and thus a fitting subject of study. But while pockets of research exist, there is little sustained analysis of the subject as a professional practice in its own right. The literature on editing reflects long-established divides, expressed variously as a distinction between journalistic and literary texts, âpre-publicationâ and âpost-publicationâ, or practical and scholarly. In the practice camp the literature is mainly descriptive, providing vital detail about what editors do on a day-to-day basis but written, as needs must, to fit particular purposes (for example Saller 2009; Clark and Phillips 2014; Ginna 2017). Although the interview genre is a popular one for authors, it does not appear to have been attempted specifically for editors prior to my own collection, Editors Talk About Editing (2015).
A rich seam of information and insight can be gleaned from essayistic accounts of professional editing (Stephen 1907; Gross 1993; Franklyn 1996; Navasky and Cornog 2012) as well as more biographical narratives such as Walter H. Pageâs A Publisherâs Confession (1905), Geoffrey Faberâs A Publisher Speaking (1934), Harold Lathamâs My Life in Publishing (1965), Thomas McCormackâs The Fiction Editor (1988), Jason Epsteinâs Book Business (2012), and Diana Athillâs Stet (2000). However this sub-genre has its own limitations. For one thing, it tends to produce a partial picture by favouring famous names over everyday practice, books rather than periodicals, and highbrow publications rather than mass market titles: examples that immediately come to mind are the accounts of lives and work at The New Yorker (Gill 1975; Gourevitch 2009; Kunkel 2001; Mehta 1998), the New York literary publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux (Kachka 2013), and individual accounts from those circles (Bok 1923; Grunwald 1988). For research purposes, they also carry the limitations that come with any personal account. As Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner note in a review of media history scholarship, âWorks like Jason Epsteinâs Book Business are invaluable as memoires but they lack the necessary critical and theoretical framework for working through questions such as we have raisedâ (2014, 438).
The editing role makes an appearance in sociological and historical surveys of book publishing, such as Sue Bradleyâs oral history The British Book Trade (2008), David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleeryâs Introduction to Book History (2013), Iain Stevensonâs Book Makers (2010) and John B. Thompsonâs Merchants of Culture (2010). In such accounts, however, editing is present as a small part of a larger publishing identity. When it comes to periodicals, one survey notes that scholarship about magazine editing is âpublished at wide intervals in a disparate range of publications and made relatively inaccessible due to poor cataloguing and indexingâ (Joliffe 1995, 52). Another study asks: âHow does one begin to quantify and speculate on the variety of functions [that] editors of periodicals served in nineteenth-century Britain? So often we refer to someone as âeditingâ a magazine, without much thought about what such duties entailsâ (Finkelstein and Patten 2006, 148). Even when the editing role is clearly in view, historical analysis is commonly fragmented by time periods and by genre.
The reasons for the gaps in attention are varied and interdependent. They are explored throughout the book but for now, the following headings are indicative:
Elusiveness
Editing is everywhere and therefore nowhere. Even on a specialist database, a keyword search for cognate terms results in a near-infinite number of hits, almost all referring to the editor of a specific text, rather than the practice as such. Editing shares this quality with other forms of mediation. The word âindexâ, for example, does not appear in the index of key bibliographical reference books; a single instance âleads only to a finger-wagging page on the importance of a modern descriptive bibliography having an indexâ. 1 In design, an art historian complains: âGraphic design is everywhere. Yet it is often taken for granted, passing unnoticed and unremarked as it blends in with the visual culture of everyday life ⊠Newspapers, gum-wrappers and websites are read for their content, not for their layout, choice of typeface or use of colourâ (Barnard 2005, 1â2). Others note that the âvirtual spaces of electronic communication often conceal the complex human networks necessary to most production processesâ (Drucker and McVarish 2013, 337). In film-making comes the complaint that âthe pivotal contribution of the film editor has never been analysed objectivelyâ (Reisz and Millar 1989, 9).
If editing is anywhere, it is âbehindâ something else. As book editor Tom McCormack says: â[E]ditors are always in the âbackroomâ [and] thatâs where we should beâ (1988, 95). A long-standing tradition of reticence reflects professional protectiveness of the relationship between author and editor and the fear that too much detail about productionâseeing how the sausage is madeâcould discourage the reader. In Stet, Athill explains the rationale: âIf ⊠the text ⊠needed work, then by the time it reached publication it must read as though none had been done on itâ (2000, 60â61).
Elusiveness also results from the sheer variety of tasks involved in the practice. âWhat an editor does all day and why he does it is usually a mystery to an author and just as much of a mystery to most of the people inside a publishing houseâ, writes Clarkson Potter, an editor-turned-publisher. âThe editor is thus often seen by insiders as a pleasant flimflam artist without any professional standingâ (1990, 82â83). It is no accident that many books and articles on intermediary roles have the word âinvisibleâ in the title; even a brief search yields The Invisible Art: The Pursuit of Book Making (Hurst 2002), Remembering Mr. Shawnâs New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing (Mehta 1998), a book about translation called The Translatorâs Invisibility (Venuti 2008) and a radio programme about design called â99% Invisibleâ (2017).
Why this invisibility? Editing, indexing, designing and other forms of mediation are part of a process, at one remove from the tangible object that results from their efforts. An object claims its own physical and symbolic space but it is difficult to isolate a single step in its making, let alone evaluate the effect of that step. Often one is only aware of the step when it is done badly.
Most important of all, it is difficult to describe an absenceâin this, of the value added by the practice. Sometimes an attempt is made: a study on âThe Invisible World of Intermediariesâ (Ehrlich 1999) looks at the support provided by librarians, while another names and highlights âthe invisible infrastructure of standardsâ (Gorur 2012). Applied to the digital realm, research demonstrates the ways in which the collective âwisdom of the crowdâ is underwritten, unseen, by credentialed educators in universities who provide a base set of skills necessary for peer production. A snapshot of administrators on Wikipedia, for example, showed that over 90% had completed college; over a third held postgraduate degrees; and nearly half were currently students (Kreiss et al. 2011). Peer production would continue without such formal support but probably not to the same extent and quality. And yet the mediating role of such institutions is taken for granted.
Ambiguity can give editing and other intermediary practices a liminal, sometimes shameful air, no matter how respectable the work. And it can lead not just to invisibility but to hostility. One study suggests that mistrust arises when a go-between breaks the rule of equal barter or reciprocity (Sowell 1996). In folklore, grain millers are commonly suspected of thievery because âinstead of growing something or making something â both of which result in tangibles and are therefore understandable â they processed something ⊠and this value-added quality was hard to quantifyâ (Atwood 2008, 112). In the colonial era, the term âDragomaniaâ was coined to describe the fear and loathing felt towards oriental intermediaries who served as interpreters (Bellos 2011, 130). A more droll expression comes in Mark Twainâs âLionising Murderersâ: âYours was not, in the beginning, a criminal nature, but circumstances changed it. At the age of nine you stole sugar. At the age of fifteen you stole money. At twenty you stole horses. At twenty-five you committed arson. At thirty, hardened in crime, you became an editorâ (Twain 1996, 183).
In interviews with practitioners, the recurring imagery of âdirtyâ laundry or ânakedâ copy serves as reminders of the actâs liminality. But that can be part of the fascination, and the culture of editing as a dark art lends itself to dark humour. The newspaper night editor John McIntyre jokes, âAll these years at the paper, and I canât quite determine the precise point at which I step through a portal into a parallel dimensio...