Eleanor Gould Packard, 1917-2005

Eleanor Gould Packard never had a formal job title at the New Yorker, but it's safe to say that she was a careful reader who looked at just about every article before it was finalized, steering the magazine's writers towards the utmost clarity. A NYT obituary does a fine job of covering the arc of her career, from "a myth that she flyspecked an entire issue and enclosed it with her application" to the revelation that she "never used a computer and deadline pressure could sometimes render her handwritten work moot, especially during Tina Brown's chaotic six years as editor."

Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of the Times editorial board, contributes his own memories of Miss Gould's corrections on the op-ed page:

"I thought I knew a lot about the English language at the time. I had a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton, an old-fashioned kind of doctorate with an emphasis on literary history and textual editing. So it came as a surprise to see those proofs. Broader questions had been settled. But it was clear from Miss Gould's annotations--her very direct strictures--that a few details of syntax, usage and logic still needed to be fixed."