Deadlines

by Henry Justin Smith

This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't remember why I tracked down a copy of this, but it must have been something H.L. Mencken wrote about it in a Smart Set review (S.T. Joshi's collections of Mencken's work, released as the pieces become copyright-free, are a brilliant idea, incidentally).

At first I wondered what Mencken was so pleased with, since the book starts off with a few bland character sketches of newsroom employees at an unnamed Chicago paper. But Smith is just getting warmed up, and his portraits -- based, I assume, of people he knew at the Daily News -- become richer and more novelistic until we have the full lineup: the cub, the office drunk (just one, presumably for the sake of simplicity), the star reporter, the copy boy, the poet (people were once paid to supply verse for daily papers), the copy editor who in another era ran the city desk, and more.

Their biographies and dealings with one another are fascinating -- I was expecting a stream of funny stories and didn't get them, but an air of wistfulness (almost sorrow), frustrated ambitions, and lives gone awry pervades the book and more than makes up for it. I happen to have gone to work for newspapers when the generation that followed these people was still around, though dying off -- the last years before the transformation of newspaper work into something like a profession -- and there were plenty of moments when I caught flashes of people I'd known.

So points for authenticity and human drama. But will we ever see a book about newspapers where a copy editor isn't a symbol of professional failure, secret sorrows and obsolescence? Probably not.

[Becky Bradway · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very entertaining book from the 20's about the rowdy journalism of the era. Everything in The Front Page is true. Lots of amusing anecdotes about journalists. And really well written! I'm sort of surprised that this book slipped into total obscurity, because it has some historical importance if you're interested in the time period. Carl Sandburg, for one, is featured under the label "The Poet." Ben Hecht pops up, too. It's free online.