ONCE WERE EDITORS:

Mary Norris, a copy editor charged with helping the magazine enforce its high standards, and the author of this splendid book, is an admirable woman totally immersed in and loving her work with words, writing, and writers--in no way pedantic and only mildly prescriptive, her own writing easy and unpretentious, touched throughout with genial good humor. In a wonderful introduction, she retraces her early work history, probably not quite the career path we'd imagine for a typical New Yorker employee--at 15, for reasons of sanitation, "checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland"; after graduation from Douglass College at Rutgers, a job at the Cleveland Costume Company, where "I learned to repair big papier-mache animal heads and not to paint the panther's eyes blue."

"I called a local dairy and asked whether there were any openings for milkmen." She fantasized about owning a dairy farm, she tells us. And she liked cows. "'We've never had a lady drive a milk truck, but there's no reason not,' a man said...." She mastered driving a dual-transmission truck, survived a crash, and was given her own milk-delivery route. 

You put the milk in a chute, she tells us, and shouted "Milkman!" But she wasn't a man, and she didn't like "lady"--"it seemed not feminist"--so she settled for "milkwoman, which was a bit too anatomically correct and made me sound like a wet nurse. I muffled the last syllables."

She gave up her milk route to accept a fellowship in English at the University of Vermont, where there was also an agricultural school. She learned to milk cows there and later got a job "packaging mozzarella on the night shift in a cheese factory," where she "had a secret yen to operate the forklift truck."

Somewhere along the line, on the road to The New Yorker, she became a member of the Brotherhood of Teamsters. She maintains her chauffeur's license.

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