The Press: Best Man in the Business

In 1903 a grey-eyed, schoolmarmish New England girl named Gertrude Battles Lane spent her last $10 to get from Boston to Manhattan where, on the strength of her experience as stenographer and part-time editor of the puny Boston Beacon, she got a job with the Woman’s Home Companion at $18 a week. Last week Gertrude Lane died, a late-fiftyish spinster, one of the few great women editors* in the U.S., a vice president of Crowell-Collier Publishing Co., and although she had never asked for a raise, earning $52,000 a year.

Editor-in-chief of the Woman’s Home Companion for 29 years, she edited it from a circulation of 737,764 to 3,607,974. That increase was only partly due to her buying the high-priced fiction of Kathleen Norris, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and other favorites of the weaker sex, paying $25,000 for the unpublished letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, hiring Eleanor Roosevelt to edit a forum department in the Companion called “Mrs. Roosevelt’s Page.” (Gertrude Lane was a lifelong Republican.) She was as shrewd an editor as she was hardworking. She was a leader in developing the women’s magazines from mere vehicles of sentimental fiction to glorifiers of the household arts—a change which not only broadened their appeal but made them immensely profitable by attracting household advertising. Said Editor Lane of herself: “I was a hog for work and so I got ahead.”

Not without reason did Crowell’s board chairman, Joseph Palmer Knapp, call her “the best man in the business.”

* Other front-rank U. S. women magazine editors: Beatrice Gould (Ladies’ Home Journal, world’s biggest women’s magazine); Edna Chase (Vogue); Carmel Snow (Harper’s Bazaar); Mrs. William Brown Meloney (This Week);Betsy Talbot Blackwell (Mademoiselle).