The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 2, Harry Furniss [affordable ebook reader txt] 📗

Editors—Publishers—An Offer—Why I Refused it—The Pall Mall Budget—Lika Joko—The New Budget—The Truth about my Enterprises—Au Revoir!

Only the fortunate—or should we not rather say the unfortunate?—man who has made up his mind to produce a journal of his own can have the very faintest conception of the work and worry, the pains and penalties, the hopes and fears, the anxiety and exasperation, involved in the process. I have gone through it all, and perhaps something more than all by comparison with other people in the same peculiar predicament. For weeks before the promised periodical sees the light the unfortunate proprietor feels himself to be a very Atlas supporting Heaven knows how many cosmic schemes.

The first editor of my acquaintance was a little boy in knickerbockers, with a lavish profusion of auburn locks, an old-fashioned physiognomy, a wiry if diminutive frame, and a quick, nervous temperament, whose youthful eyes had beheld the suns of fourteen summers.

My last editor is one whose physique would be commonly qualified by the adjective podgy, of a full face, but with head somewhat depleted of its capillary adornments, for which deprivation it has to thank the snows of six-and-forty winters.

Our intimacy has been of long standing, for my first and last editor is one and the same being—the present writer.

From the day that I, as a little schoolboy, seated on the uncompromising school-form looked upon as a necessary adjunct to the inception of knowledge, produced in MS. and for private circulation only my first journalistic attempt, up to the present moment, I can confidently assert that during my[Pg 273] varied experience I never was brought into contact with a more interesting set of men than those I have seen stretched upon the editorial rack.

The primary requirements which tend to make up the composition of an editor are good health, an impenetrably thick skin, and the best of humour. Secondly, he must be able to command experience, a thirst for work, and the power of application; and, thirdly, he must possess tact and discretion. A universal and comprehensive knowledge of human nature must also be his, for not only has he to be capable of judging and humouring the overstrung men and women of talent with whom he deals—those fragile, sensitive flowers from whom he extracts the honey wherewith to gratify the palate of a journalistically epicurean public—but he must also have a thorough knowledge of that public to enable him to direct those who work for him, for they, shut up in their studies and studios, may not realise that the man at the look-out has to weather the storms of public opinion, of which they reck little if it be that what they work at may be to their own liking, albeit unpalatable to those whom they seek to feed.

Like poets, editors are born, not made. An editor may make a paper, but a paper never made an editor. But as to the commercial success or failure of a periodical, the editor is absolutely a nonentity. There are two sides to the production of a periodical: one is the business side, the other the editorial. The success or failure of a periodical depends almost entirely upon the business manager.

One of the youngest and most successful newspaper proprietors once called me a fool. I wrote and asked him why. We had an interview. He said frankly: "You are a fool, in my opinion, for producing too good an article for the money. The public does not appreciate good work, and you will never make a commercial success of your paper. Your staff is too good; your printing is too good; your paper is too good. I am a success because I know where to buy paper cheap and sell it for a profit. I have thirty publications, but their names, their contents, writing, or art I never think about, nor does the public[Pg 274] either. We ink something on the paper, and sell it at so much a pound profit."

But I had nothing whatever to do with the commercial side of the arrangements connected with ventures associated with my name. Ah! how little the public know what goes on behind the scenes in the newspaper world! If you stop a publication with which your name is associated, everyone at once, very properly, dubs you a failure. As what? An editor, of course. That is the mistake, the injustice. How many periodicals have the most talked of publishers started and stopped? Scores of them. Yet are they therefore failures? No, no more than the manager of a theatre is who produces a piece which runs a night or two and comes off. He still has his theatre, and other plays. So is it in the publishing world.

It is the isolated editor, without the machinery of a big office, or the head of the man of commerce,—if he stops, from whatever cause, his one effort is the failure! The "successful publisher" stops a dozen new ventures in the same time, and he is still considered successful. A publisher is very much like a conjuror: he must start two or three tricks, so that if one is likely to go wrong he can draw the attention of the public off it by another, and the first is quickly dropped or reintroduced under another name. My one mistake in publishing was that having started a success, Lika Joko, I let it drop to take up another. But let my confessions on this subject be brief and in order.

Before I had any notion of leaving Punch I had conceived an idea for a monthly magazine to be called Lika Joko; Harry Furniss's Monthly, and had already had a number of drawings engraved, specimen copies printed, and had gone to great expense in the preliminary work. Of course, the Punch men were to be the chief contributors, and Mr. E.J. Milliken was writing a