A LONG TIME IT WAS, like writing itself, an amateur profession. No editor had gone to editing school. There were no editing schools to go to. Editors invented themselves, and still do even now when professionally trained.
Editors make themselves.
If an editor is born, it is a processional birth. People think editors are unromantic, unimaginative, straight-laced, fixated perhaps on bowel movements and similar ephemera, disciplinarians with red pens, sticklers for the right thing, bean counters, mechanical, officious, obsessive rather than passionate. I was told by another editor that editors are eccentrics. And as much as I wish to deny this, I admit it. They harbour the serious eccentricity of the possessors of passions, of secrets, of small knowledges, the cabalistic and the esoteric.