A funny thing happened to our magazine on its way to press: from out of
the blue one of our intended authors withdrew a work from consideration.
Now, to lose a piece slated for publication is a headache, but to lose one
at press time is a nightmare. Assembling and laying out an issue of SEXTANT
combines aspects of tiling a mosaic floor, engineering a symmetrical crossword
puzzle, and deciphering code. Well, if our design and production staff lost
sleep redoing the magazine, I'm pleased to report that nobody panicked,
and the resulting SEXTANT is gratifyingly whole. (Help also arrived in the
form of a late-appearing book review.)
But something about that missing article won't let go. Thinking about why
that is so has led me to articulate some hidden truths of magazine editing.
When the great French author Gustave Flaubert advised that one's hand should
be present everywhere in a book, yet visible nowhere, he was thinking of
the novelist, but the remark captures the essence of the editor's task.
Whatever the editor's role might be in bringing an article to finished form,
his or her handiwork is always and appropriately concealed.
Our missing essay, written with great charm--all, the author's--concerned an obscure type of 19th-century Syrian footwear for women: an elevated, wooden-soled platform shoe, or patten, worn to protect the foot from mud or wetness. The editor's work here involved assembling illustrations. The author had provided suggestions, but almost all of these led to dead-ends. In one case, a needed illustration proved unobtainable because the book containing it had been irrevocably stolen from a Harvard collection. When a second copy was finally located by our interlibrary loan desk, the section containing the needed print, and that section alone, appeared to have been razored out.
A rare, late-18th century Turkish manuscript with accompanying illustrations finally turned up in microfilm, a single drawing of which we intended to convert in the darkroom into a usable photographic print. However, the library in possession of the work agreed in the end to release only a paper photocopy of the text (in Turkish, of course), and that with all the illustrations excised.
Finding these Middle Eastern pattens, or pictures of them, became for
a while the editor's sole (so to speak) preoccupation. The research trail
included contacts with the Textiles and Costumes Department of the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard's Fine Arts Library, the Nelson Atkins Museum
of Art in Kansas City, and the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada, where
pay-dirt was at last reached: three color slides were loaned out to us with
permission to reproduce.
At the Semitic Museum at Harvard, Assistant Curator of Collections James
Armstrong invited me to the archives in the basement of the building on
Divinity Avenue to take all the photos I wanted of the four pairs in the
research collection. The hand-written acquisitions ledger that Armstrong
produced and dusted off showed that the pattens (called cobcobs here)
had been acquired in 1902 from the Harvard Divinity School, which in turn
had received them from collector Seleh Merrill, who'd purchased them at
various Middle Eastern sites (Palestine, Beirut, Syria) in 1892 and 1893.
The four pairs of Harvard cobcobs were wonderfully diverse, some
beautifully inlaid with ivory (done in Damascus, the ledger indicated) and
high-rising, presumably to keep the lady's aristocratic head high while
simultaneously keeping the aristocratic feet off the wet bath-house floor.
In contrast, a pair for the lady's maid, or slave, was lower to the ground
and made of unadorned wood.
With these slides and photographs in hand, the Sextant's design and
production staff were able to perform the usual magic, and we were ready
to go to press. And then the piece was unexpectedly pulled.
What's especially ironic here is that our author had literally never seen
the illustrations for the article, illustrations that would have eternally
redounded to that author's credit, I think, had publication been allowed.
Whose loss is it? To be sure, our readers have missed a treat, but we've
already made up for it in this issue. So that leaves the author, certainly.
My point here, alas, is that the loss is legitimately, if secretly, also
the editor's. That richly illustrated article had given me a great sense
of accomplishment.