St. Jude, patron of lost causes, is a natural for litmags, and, even better, there’s a designated intercessor for editors: Giovanni Melchior Bosco, a 19th-century Piedmontese, who founded the Salesian Society, renowned for its work in schools, prisons, and hospitals.

Having discovered Don Bosco in Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac,” I asked an American Salesian, Fr. Sean Rooney, for more details. “Early on,” he replied, “St. John Bosco realized the tremendous amount of ignorance regarding the simplest facts of our faith, so he published ‘Catholic Readings,’ which gave him a much larger audience than he could have reached from one pulpit. He then branched out into publishing books for his students, mostly poor, inner-city youth. His books for the general public included one of the first Italian texts on the metric system and a well-regarded history of Italy. Among the first shops he started in his school was a print shop. As you can imagine, with no funding and a lot of young people to take care of, he did most of the writing, editing, and printing himself. ”

More Googling revealed that the classic patron of editors is none other than John the Apostle, co-author of the bestselling book of all time and patron of the entire industry: writers, typesetters/compositors, engravers/lithographers, papermakers, printers, bookbinders, publishers, booksellers and art dealers...as well as theologians, Taos, New Mexico, and the diocese of Cleveland, Ohio.

And then there’s that secular miracle-worker, drug-heiress Ruth Lilly, who recently gave Poetry magazine $120 million! The N.Y. Times published my letter denouncing this largesse as “bad philanthropy”—too much money thrown at a tiny organization for undeclared purposes. (I admitted to being “green with envy.”)

I don’t think an editor should ever pray directly for cash—for undiminished eyesight, sure, why not; maybe even for “sustained vision.” In any case, I have installed Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry, among my household gods. After all, she published “Prufrock” and “Trees” and “Booth beat boldly with his big bass drum.” And she kept the faith. Late in life, she recalled the tenth-anniversary dinner (at which Vachel Lindsay chanted “The Congo”) as “atonement for long periods of drab disappointment or dark despair. I drew a long breath of renewed power, and felt that my little magazine was fulfilling some of our seemingly extravagant hopes.”