Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

Who wants to be an editor? Millionaires do

tom hodgkinson

On the occasion of The Oldie’s 30th birthday, I hope readers will forgive me for reflecting on Town Mouse’s own life in magazines.

The magazine I edit, the Idler, is a mere 28 years old. I started it from my bedroom in my twenties, while on the dole, and we’ve had a somewhat bumpy ride since. We started as a bi-monthly, but managed to produce only about four or five issues a year. After a while, we turned into a bi-annual. When that proved to be too much work, we published it just once a year, with the exception of 2015, when we published no issues at all.

Luckily, we were rescued by a group of investors, and we now produce six Idlers a year for a growing gang of readers. And though at times it’s been tough, I maintain that editing a small magazine is the best job in the world. This might seem a flippant bit of rhetorical hyperbole, but I can prove it.

My proof comes in the form of two notable editors and former editors of small magazines, Sigrid Rausing of Granta and Mary-Kay Wilmers of the London Review of Books. Both are very good and successful periodicals, and both are owned by extremely wealthy women who have no need to work. Rausing is heir to the Tetrapak fortune, and Wilmers has been able to dip into a family trust to bail out her mag when required.

Money being no object, the highly intelligent Wilmers and Rausing could have done literally anything they wanted with their lives. They could have worked in the City, become doctors or lawyers, started a gambling website, built up a property empire, opened a restaurant or loafed about on chaises longues smoking cheroots and hosting literary soirées. But they both chose to edit small magazines.

Why? Because editing a small magazine is simply the best job in the world. You have pure freedom to print whatever you like. Each issue is enormously exciting to assemble and, I hope, exciting to pick up for the first time, like when you listen to the new album from your favourite band. It’s an artistic creation. You build a supportive community of wonderful readers. And you are never, ever bored.

Those distinguished editors Richard Ingrams, first of Private Eye and then of The Oldie, and Tyler Brûlé, first of Wallpaper and then of Monocle, buttress my point. Both made a great success of their first magazine and could have gone on to do anything they liked. Both chose to start a second magazine. Even Charles Dickens, who made a fortune from his novels, chose magazine editor as a second job, and ran periodicals such as Household Words and All the Year Round. Oscar Wilde edited the Woman’s World from 1887 to 1889.

It’s a job I would do even if I were not being paid to do it – which for many years of the Idler’s life was in fact the case. I also edited small magazines when at school and university for no pecuniary gain, just for fun. My first magazine was the Penguin, followed by the King’s House Times, the Sixth Form Rag and, at university, Broadsheet.

It’s also a job that can be done from anywhere – at least in theory. I spent 12 years editing the Idler from my study in a farmhouse on the North Devon coast. Still, I think that an editor is really best off being a Town Mouse, because it’s so stimulating to be in the whirl of the city. A chance encounter with an old hack friend at a book launch can turn into a great piece for the mag. I’ve commissioned articles from people I’ve bumped into while riding my bicycle around town. And it’s far easier to interview and photograph interesting people when you’re in London.

What joy to be in Grub Street itself, as a Grub Street hack. To see St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, where Dr Johnson worked. To walk through Chelsea past the houses of Oscar Wilde and Carlyle. To stand on Westminster Bridge; to see a play at the Globe or a show at the Serpentine. Pure delights which cannot be replaced by Zoom meetings.

And what about gossipy lunches? You can’t really do those in the country. My resolution for 2022 is to go out for more long, boozy lunches, in the spirit of the late, great Keith Waterhouse, the master of the art.

It’s a world I grew up in, as my parents were both smoky, boozy Fleet Street hacks, and our house was often visited by their smoky, boozy mates. Lunch, said Waterhouse, was not simply about satisfying hunger: ‘It is not a meal partaken of, however congenial the company, with the principal object of nourishment,’ he wrote in his brilliant book The Theory and Practice of Lunch (1986). ‘It is not when either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry.’

So here’s to The Oldie, here’s to Grub Street and here’s to small magazines everywhere.