Help this editrix make herself a cool t-shirt

February 2, 2007 11:57 AM

A co-worker of mine is the librarian at the publishing house where I work. She found some librarian "career girl" novels on the net and showed them to me for a laugh. I suggested she take a cover image to a T-shirt shop and have a shirt made. She loved the idea and is going to do it with this image, and put the hilarious excerpt from the book on the back. Now I'm jealous and want a similar shirt that relates to my job. I'm an editor. I doubt they had "career girl" pulp novels about editing back in the day, so what equally cool/kitschy images could I put on my front that relate to editing?
posted by orange swan to clothing, beauty, & fashion (10 comments total)

A couple of movie characters come to mind--Sarah Paulsen in Down with Love. She was the only woman editor among all those old blowhards at "Banner House" who all call each other CT and NW and so forth. I always get a kick out of it because one of the guys has the same initials as me, and I got into publishing and lo and behold, you really do sort of call each other by initials like that! :) But anyway it's set in the 50s, you know, so the suits she wears are actually very career pulp in a way.

And Parker Posey in You've Got Mail. Kind of a Judith Reagan type, and, well, it's Parker Posey.

Another different idea is there is a band called the Editors. A fellow editor has a t-shirt that just says "editors" which is kind of funny, especially because only a few people will have heard of the band.
posted by lampoil at 12:29 PM on February 2, 2007 [1 favorite]

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but Katherine Hepburn in Woman of the Year came to mind.
posted by vignettist at 12:45 PM on February 2, 2007

Movies are good bet - can't think of one though.
posted by xammerboy at 1:12 PM on February 2, 2007

Maybe check out this website? The linked page has a good one for nurses, and if you poke around a bit on the site or the related websites on its link pages, you might come up with something. (Does it haveto be about your job? Because some of them are hilarious on their own, for example, this one, or this one which has the wonderful subhead, "Must we have a personality?"). Or maybe this magazine, if you take out some of the extraneous detail on the cover? Or maybe even this one, though it may be targeted more at writers than editors?

You'll see there are other magazine covers at the sites I linked, and I didn't check them all so you might find something else in there. In any case, this sounds like a fun project, and I wish you lots of luck!
posted by onlyconnect at 2:09 PM on February 2, 2007

"Grammatical errors make me [sic]!"

Sorry.

GIS says: Here.
posted by nonmyopicdave at 2:32 PM on February 2, 2007

The Iowa Review sold a rejection letter t-shirt when I was at the workshop, but that was thirteen years ago.
posted by brujita at 4:12 PM on February 2, 2007

Or maybe this one, from this enormous collection of magazine covers?
posted by onlyconnect at 4:29 PM on February 2, 2007

See if you can ask Metafilter's GaelFC to check through her library of Career Romances for Young Moderns.
posted by MsMolly at 4:41 PM on February 2, 2007

OMG. Thanks you, orange swan, for asking this question and alerting me to the existence of this genre. I love it!
posted by MadamM at 5:17 PM on February 2, 2007

Dear editor,
Surely you mean envious rather than jealous?
Great shirt ideas!
posted by fish tick at 6:57 PM on February 2, 2007