In Praise of One of America’s All-Time Great Book Sections (RIP)

Washingtonian: “Actually, the Washington Post Layoffs Were a Bigger Bloodbath Than You Thought. Nearly half of the paper’s newsroom was eliminated during last week’s cuts—possibly the largest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation.

LitHub – Gerald Howard on the Washington Post Book World and the Further Enshittification of All Things. “Here is what it felt like to work in publishing, particularly as an editor, from the mid-1970s until the advent of the internet. You lived, for the most part happily, under a daily avalanche of printed and typed material. You were saturated with words. The manuscripts of course, which arrived as if on a conveyor belt from agents and authors. But also an endless number of periodicals and newspapers, each manifesting in your in-box (in-boxes!) with the implied understanding that you should at least try to read some of its contents. Publishing companies were generous with subscriptions, some of them for you alone, others shared with three or four of your colleagues. The latter would be routed by assistants with initials, and you’d cross off yours once done and send it to the next person. On and on these publications came (and then went): Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist , the Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, New York Review of Books, Saturday Review, The American Scholar, Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, People, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Washington Monthly, it never ended and you really didn’t want it to. Some of the magazines you just skimmed for reviews and book chat, others you read a portion of, and some others you felt an intellectual or literary obligation to pay very close attention to, even if the contents had no connection to anything you were working on. You were expected to keep up, and that was both a requirement of the job and a pleasure. For someone like me this approached perfect happiness. My survival to my current age (75) is proof positive that no number of book reviews read, however high, can possibly have the least ill effect on one’s health, or I’d have left the planet a long time ago. To put it bluntly, you read the Times Book Review because you had to, but you read Book World because you wanted to…There is the bitter irony to consider that this literary erasure was done by the man who owns the largest bookselling entity on earth.”