Until well after the Second World War, British publishing had no “editors” as we know them. The person who examined manuscripts was a “publisher’s reader” — a low-status functionary who worked from home, served multiple firms simultaneously, and left minimal commentary. Evelyn Waugh’s brother Alec, working at Chapman & Hall in the 1920s, would simply scrawl “NBG” (“No bloody good”) on a rejected title page.

D. J. Taylor traces this history through the rise of the professional editor, which happened only as publishing firms grew too large to absorb risky bets and needed to maximize every title’s quality.

  • Edward Garnett (1868–1937) was the famous exception — he blue-penciled ~20,000 manuscripts, worked with D. H. Lawrence, Galsworthy, and Conrad, and was offered (and declined) a Companionship of Honour
  • The main pre-war editorial concern was legal: libel and obscenity. Orwell’s correspondence with publisher Gollancz focused on avoiding roman à clef identification, not literary merit
  • American imports deemed “daring” had to be sanitized for the prudish British market — editing as moral gatekeeping
  • The postwar editor emerged as firms professionalized: bigger enterprises with less margin for error

The centerpiece is the story of Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber, who discovered William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (then Strangers from Within) after a freelance reader had dismissed it as “Rubbish & dull. Pointless” with a circled “R” for “Reject.” Monteith read past where everyone else had stopped, fought the sales director at the Book Committee, and spent months working with Golding on revisions. The two became close friends — Golding called Monteith one of the three most important people in his life.

Taylor argues this kind of relationship is nearly impossible today: publishing is larger, more impersonal, staff and authors don’t stay as long. The shared cultural capital of “Oxford-educated gentlemen” has (rightly) given way to broader access, but something was lost in the transition — the patient, collaborative craft of making a book as good as it could be.