"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of Kathleen Norris, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and other favorites of the weaker sex, paying $25,000 for the unpublished letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, hiring Eleanor Roosevelt to edit a forum department in the Companion called "Mrs.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).

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