There's no shortage of editorial ideas

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1985 by Peter Jacobi

Connoisseur, a magazine of delightfully cheeky conceits, proffers all sorts of ideas because its editors revel in lists of superlatives--such as "American Living Monuments," further labeled "a celebration of 131 superachievers." Not three or 10 or a dozen or 25 or even 100, mind you. With Connoisseur it has to be 131! Samples:

Boy Wonder: Eve gave man the first apple worth talking about. Steve Jobs gave us the second. And the Apple II.

Chameleon Extraordinare: Miss Piggy turns a cliche into a reality. She is all things to all people.

Choreograhers: Upturned palms, friezes in profile, marches on bent knee--Paul Taylor may work a few signature motifs hard, but his ingenuity keeps taking startling turns. Of his recent ballets, the frisky, airy Arden Court is a ten.

Twyla Tharp's razzle-dazzle dances are like time capsules. Eclectic? If it's in the air, she picks it up and takes it over.

Cooks: The art of American cooking all begins with the huge, genial, erudite James Beard, our homespun answer to Lucullus.

Alice Waters, of Berkeley's Chez Panisse, is his spiritual granddaughter: just as Lucullan, but possesed of a fresh, bright spirit of adventure all her own, and handing it on to the young cooks now at large in the most imaginative kitchens in the land.

Curmudgeons: At age eighty-nine, Lewis Mumford growls on, sometimes too bitterly, yet never ineffectively, against the encroachment of the shoddy and the ill-conceived in America's life.

John Simon's intemperate screeds against every target in sight on the cultural horizon--from purity in language to the curl of an actress's lip--mask an uncompromising rage for the best. It's a fine madness.

What or who are your living monuments?

And then along comes the same magazine's choice of 30 "sublime works of art" in American public collections and its "101 Top Collectors." Life gives us "The 10 Best and 10 Worst American Cars." People each year provides, yes, the most interesting people.

The well is overflowing

There's no end to ideas: The well does not run dry. Consider the sofa bed. The convention delegate. The 24-hour deli. The cow. The courtroom. The radio. The traffic guard. The kitchen gadget. The hardware store. The essay. The tree. The tantrum. The bicycle. The turnip. The boss. The wedge. The Congress. The high jump. The string quartet. The poem.

For ideas:

* Read.

* Observe.

* Listen.

* Be open to the power of suggestion.

Those actions come close to defining the way an editor is.