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The Wayward Pressman
Collected essays about the news business and newspapers that appeared in the New Yorker magazine in the 1940s.
- GenresNonfiction
284 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1947
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About the author
A.J. Liebling
42 books72 followersAbbott Joseph "A. J." Liebling was an American journalist who was closely associated with The New Yorker from 1935 until his death.
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December 1, 2018
Other readers concoct projects that might entail reading, say, all of Balzac’s novels in chronological order (insane, you say?). Or those of Dickens. Not me. I have embarked on a quest of unquestionable merit — tracking down as many writings of A. J. Liebling’s as I can find. If you have read any of his best work, you are shivering with envy, I know. While others seem to limit their excavation of legendary journalists to reading Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel” and leave it at that, little do they suspect that there are far more delights to be had from other cherished New Yorker writers; however, a bit of online legwork might be needed.
I started this whole venture with “Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris”, which I had seen mentioned in an interview with Anthony Bourdain some time ago. Hooked, I then decided I must read all of the out-of-print books from the San Diego Public Library before they got (shudder) tossed into a rubbish bin. I quickly polished off “Chicago: The Second City” and “A Reporter at Large”. Now, I have a copy of “The Wayward Pressman” in my grasp.
And what a copy it is. An original hardback edition from Doubleday & Co., 1948, it of course has no dust cover and is somewhere between burnt orange and dirty salmon in color. Its pages are as yellow as they come, and even a few minutes of holding it transfers a smell of mustiness to one’s fingers not to be believed, necessitating surgeon-like scrubbing after a reading session, or would be the donning of thin gloves for the germaphobes among us. Remarkably, the spine is quite intact (a testament to the decline in book quality nowadays?), although almost every page is dog-eared and brown-spotted with what one hopes is just spilt coffee. The inside cover has one of those glued-in pockets that at one time received a stamped card containing the due date; the back cover has a scannable chip (instituted by SDPL about two years ago). The title page has been punched by some long-discarded contraption that leaves a series of tiny holes in the page, spelling out “San Diego Public Library” when held singly against the light. Some overzealous librarian also punched page 49. Page 271’s lower corner has perhaps been torn away by an angry pet, removing the ability to read Paul’s last name in page 272’s footnote.
Yes, you’re on the edge of your seat now, aren’t you? Liebling’s writing is marvelous, as always, and the first section is basically a memoir of how he got into the newspaper business in the first place, with some earlier reminiscences of his college days at Dartmouth and at the Columbia School of Journalism. Lots of insight into what reportage was like in the 20’s are included, which of course was during Prohibition. As early as page 63, we have skipped the time he spent in Paris, chronicled memorably and indispensably in “Between Meals”, a sabbatical of sorts ostensibly for study at the Sorbonne but instead devoted to eating well on not a lot of francs. (For contrast, pick up “Down and Out in London and Paris” and read about George Orwell’s stint in the kitchen of a Parisian eatery — it’s fantastic). Liebling’s career as a newspaperman sputters during the Depression, and he was there for the unfortunate end of the great New York World, the paper started by Joseph Pulitzer.
Liebling had been lucky enough to land a full-time gig at the New Yorker magazine in 1935, his employer until his death in 1963. The second section contains a number of pieces that he wrote for the New Yorker under the rubric “The Wayward Press”, essentially an irregular Robert Benchley column that had appeared in the New Yorker between 1927 and 1937 which Liebling resurrected. These articles are all dated between 1945 and 1947; the war year stories he issued from Europe for the magazine were collected in several books (now OOP) and are now available again in the Library of America edition I have yet to peruse. That leaves a gap from 1935 to 1939 that may or may not be covered in some of the other OOP books (such as “Back Where I Came From” and “Telephone Booth Indian”). Anyway, in these articles he critiques the press, actually the New York daily newspapers with the occasional dig at Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. (I’m reminded of Graydon Carter’s defunct magazine “Spy” and its regular column on the New York Times entitled “The Old Gray Lady”.)
Perhaps the most striking piece is “Papers Within Papers”, in which he calls attention to the recent (in 1947) decision by the dailies to take in political advertising bucks — essentially editorial pieces completely unvetted by the editors — that, without obvious libel, engaged in outlandish claims and innuendo with headlines that might convince the reader that they were actual news stories. In these current days of “advertising” on Facebook that amount to lies and propaganda and CNN webpage “stories” feebly and microscopically labeled “Paid Content”, this article seems alarmingly prescient. The defensive statements made by the publisher of the New York Times, Alfred Sulzberger, sound eerily like those of Mark Zuckerberg.
What Liebling was doing at the New Yorker could not have occurred without his firm grounding in the inner workings of newspapers (both in small — Providence, R.I. — and large markets). There’s a lot of information here about the business and how it was conducted back then that you won’t find anywhere outside a well-researched bio of one of these owners. Over the course of his career, Liebling saw the number of dailies in New York dwindle from over fifteen to less than a half dozen during his career; the underachieving (in quality) Daily News led the field with a circulation of over 2,250,000 in 1947. His was an era of family-owned papers, although consolidation was already occurring and corporate ownership and publicly traded ventures were yet to come.
The last piece in the book, “A Free Press?”, was written for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and what a piece it is! This single article should be back in print and part of every School of Journalism’s curriculum. It reads like it could have been written yesterday, and before there was the much bandied-about term “fake news”, Liebling was taking the press to task for publishing things that just weren’t true. And he describes the owners and their political agendas. He clearly wanted the public to be aware of who these people are and to seek out a number of news sources to (hopefully) get an idea of what is really going on. He includes a footnote relating an idea of Albert Camus’ to have a newspaper that is published after the dailies that computes the probability of the truth of each article based on analysis of a database of owner and reporter past records of accuracy. But there’s much more to this excellent article.
This is fascinating stuff for anyone left in America who actually cares about a free and responsible press.
Next up: Liebling at the New Yorker: Uncollected Essays
I started this whole venture with “Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris”, which I had seen mentioned in an interview with Anthony Bourdain some time ago. Hooked, I then decided I must read all of the out-of-print books from the San Diego Public Library before they got (shudder) tossed into a rubbish bin. I quickly polished off “Chicago: The Second City” and “A Reporter at Large”. Now, I have a copy of “The Wayward Pressman” in my grasp.
And what a copy it is. An original hardback edition from Doubleday & Co., 1948, it of course has no dust cover and is somewhere between burnt orange and dirty salmon in color. Its pages are as yellow as they come, and even a few minutes of holding it transfers a smell of mustiness to one’s fingers not to be believed, necessitating surgeon-like scrubbing after a reading session, or would be the donning of thin gloves for the germaphobes among us. Remarkably, the spine is quite intact (a testament to the decline in book quality nowadays?), although almost every page is dog-eared and brown-spotted with what one hopes is just spilt coffee. The inside cover has one of those glued-in pockets that at one time received a stamped card containing the due date; the back cover has a scannable chip (instituted by SDPL about two years ago). The title page has been punched by some long-discarded contraption that leaves a series of tiny holes in the page, spelling out “San Diego Public Library” when held singly against the light. Some overzealous librarian also punched page 49. Page 271’s lower corner has perhaps been torn away by an angry pet, removing the ability to read Paul’s last name in page 272’s footnote.
Yes, you’re on the edge of your seat now, aren’t you? Liebling’s writing is marvelous, as always, and the first section is basically a memoir of how he got into the newspaper business in the first place, with some earlier reminiscences of his college days at Dartmouth and at the Columbia School of Journalism. Lots of insight into what reportage was like in the 20’s are included, which of course was during Prohibition. As early as page 63, we have skipped the time he spent in Paris, chronicled memorably and indispensably in “Between Meals”, a sabbatical of sorts ostensibly for study at the Sorbonne but instead devoted to eating well on not a lot of francs. (For contrast, pick up “Down and Out in London and Paris” and read about George Orwell’s stint in the kitchen of a Parisian eatery — it’s fantastic). Liebling’s career as a newspaperman sputters during the Depression, and he was there for the unfortunate end of the great New York World, the paper started by Joseph Pulitzer.
Liebling had been lucky enough to land a full-time gig at the New Yorker magazine in 1935, his employer until his death in 1963. The second section contains a number of pieces that he wrote for the New Yorker under the rubric “The Wayward Press”, essentially an irregular Robert Benchley column that had appeared in the New Yorker between 1927 and 1937 which Liebling resurrected. These articles are all dated between 1945 and 1947; the war year stories he issued from Europe for the magazine were collected in several books (now OOP) and are now available again in the Library of America edition I have yet to peruse. That leaves a gap from 1935 to 1939 that may or may not be covered in some of the other OOP books (such as “Back Where I Came From” and “Telephone Booth Indian”). Anyway, in these articles he critiques the press, actually the New York daily newspapers with the occasional dig at Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. (I’m reminded of Graydon Carter’s defunct magazine “Spy” and its regular column on the New York Times entitled “The Old Gray Lady”.)
Perhaps the most striking piece is “Papers Within Papers”, in which he calls attention to the recent (in 1947) decision by the dailies to take in political advertising bucks — essentially editorial pieces completely unvetted by the editors — that, without obvious libel, engaged in outlandish claims and innuendo with headlines that might convince the reader that they were actual news stories. In these current days of “advertising” on Facebook that amount to lies and propaganda and CNN webpage “stories” feebly and microscopically labeled “Paid Content”, this article seems alarmingly prescient. The defensive statements made by the publisher of the New York Times, Alfred Sulzberger, sound eerily like those of Mark Zuckerberg.
What Liebling was doing at the New Yorker could not have occurred without his firm grounding in the inner workings of newspapers (both in small — Providence, R.I. — and large markets). There’s a lot of information here about the business and how it was conducted back then that you won’t find anywhere outside a well-researched bio of one of these owners. Over the course of his career, Liebling saw the number of dailies in New York dwindle from over fifteen to less than a half dozen during his career; the underachieving (in quality) Daily News led the field with a circulation of over 2,250,000 in 1947. His was an era of family-owned papers, although consolidation was already occurring and corporate ownership and publicly traded ventures were yet to come.
The last piece in the book, “A Free Press?”, was written for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and what a piece it is! This single article should be back in print and part of every School of Journalism’s curriculum. It reads like it could have been written yesterday, and before there was the much bandied-about term “fake news”, Liebling was taking the press to task for publishing things that just weren’t true. And he describes the owners and their political agendas. He clearly wanted the public to be aware of who these people are and to seek out a number of news sources to (hopefully) get an idea of what is really going on. He includes a footnote relating an idea of Albert Camus’ to have a newspaper that is published after the dailies that computes the probability of the truth of each article based on analysis of a database of owner and reporter past records of accuracy. But there’s much more to this excellent article.
This is fascinating stuff for anyone left in America who actually cares about a free and responsible press.
Next up: Liebling at the New Yorker: Uncollected Essays
Displaying 1 of 1 review