Thinking Hard for Ourselves: A Short History of Editors

Chapter five of Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit, a book on the craft of self-editing*, is dedicated to the (mainly western and Eurocentric, it must be said) history of editing. She traces the editor’s genealogy through the following positions.

She originates editing with scribes, who, in ancient Mesopotamia, “had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer” with their powers to understand and shape the written word. Later, in medieval Europe, “the sleepy scribe would accidentally skip or alter words; the arrogant yet lucid would rewrite an obtuse passage; the zealous would interpolate” (and sometimes a feline coworker would contribute their own take on a manuscript).