Let’s hope not …

… Is Line Editing a Lost Art? | Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Joseph Heller once told The Paris Review that his editor, Robert Gottlieb, thought “it was a shame” that the reader didn’t get to a particular chapter until late in Catch-22. Heller “cut about 50 or 60 pages from the opening just to get there more quickly.” Gottlieb, though, preferred to disappear from the public discussion of books he edited, thinking an “editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one.”