As you may have gotten from our lead essay, this Summer Books issue, alongside a rich compendium of seven reviews of new titles, we are stepping away from the publication calendar to look at old books that we return to. In the special Winter Books issue to come, you can look forward to recommendations from the editors for great reads (and gifts) from 2024. But for now, I have asked the editors for stories about their most precious books, great works but also totems that some of us at the Washington Examiner magazine keep with us to sit on the shelf like old friends and, with any luck, pass down generations.
— Nicholas Clairmont, life & arts editor
HUGO GURDON, editor in chief
Evelyn Waugh ’s novels are piercingly intelligent, acutely observed, humane even when skewering pomposity and folly, enormously funny, and delivered in the most lucid prose of any 20th-century writer of English literature .
I’m fortunate to have a first edition of Scoop, Waugh’s brilliant satire of colonialism and the journalism not only of Fleet Street but also of America — Washington Post newsroom, take note. The central character, William Boot, works for the original Daily Beast, from which today’s lamentable publication gets not just its name but perhaps also some of its vulgarity, even if certainly not its left-wingery.
Published in London in 1938 by Chapman and Hall, Scoop originally sold for 7 shillings sixpence. But it has become a collector’s item. My copy was given to me by my wife, Meghan, as a birthday present 25 years ago after an antiquarian bookseller in New York let her know a copy had become available.
Written near the end of the colonial era, it depicts a world anathematized by our own. Today’s intolerant presentism cannot get past Waugh’s use of derogatory racial terms that were the accepted argot of his time. At my recommendation, a Columbia University journalism teacher set Scoop as a text for his students in 1989, thinking as I did that every would-be journalist should be made familiar with it. His pupils reeled in horror, and nary a smile flickered across their faces. But at least they were given the chance. It is unlikely that the book would be offered to them today.
Waugh’s depiction of Europe’s scramble for Africa, including his adumbration of Ishmaelia’s constitution, is among the most brilliant pieces of sustained comedic writing in our language; “It had been found expedient to merge the functions of the national defense and inland revenue … in two main companies, the Ishmaelite Mule Tax-gathering Force and the Rifle Excisemen with a small Artillery Death Duties Corps for use against the heirs of powerful noblemen … the general’s flying columns would lumber out into the surrounding country on the heels of the fugitive population and return in time for budget day laden with the spoils of the less nimble.”
Written three-quarters of a century ago, Scoop still strikes chord after resonant chord amid the ideological hypocrisy and media implosions of our culture. Waugh’s work and my copy of it are from another time. But its brilliance is imperishable.
JIM ANTLE, executive editor
Six years ago, my apartment flooded and I was faced with what could only be described as a Sophie’s choice. I had a relatively short period of time to save either my extensive collection of records or my books.
Despite grumbling to myself as I was moving boxes at 3 o’clock in the morning that I should simply get a Spotify account like a normal person, the vinyl won . I’m not even entirely sure my high school yearbook survived and all the years later can’t quite bring myself to check.
But I am not bookless. Among the few I rescued was a compilation of my great-grandfather’s sermons. He was a Methodist minister , sharing both my religion and politics (a diehard Republican who drove many miles to vote for Herbert Hoover in his epically failed reelection bid), though we differ on the subject of Prohibition. (He was for it.) Born in 1888, he lived long enough for me to know him.
The compilation dates from 1922 to 1961, with a letter to the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church written in 1980. A true itinerant preacher, he served some 14 appointments over the course of his ministry, often moving his family around before settling into the house I knew as my great-grandparents’ in the 1950s.
While some of the sermons were typed out, many of them were jotted down on whatever scraps of paper my great-grandfather could get his hands on (which, funnily enough, is how I did my first writing as a child). There were musings on John Wesley and prevenient grace, the vices of greed and worldliness, and the need to suppress one’s temper. He tells the story of a woman who informed her pastor that she sometimes blows up but it passes quickly. Her pastor replies that this also describes a machine gun.
I’m well pleased this collection survived the flood alongside Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
DAVID MARK, managing editor
The late A. Bartlett Giamatti’s name pops up every so often in news stories around a potential MLB reinstatement of Pete Rose nearly 35 years after his banishment from the sport. It happens more frequently now that sports betting is routine, raising questions about a double standard for the baseball ’s all-time hits leader, who agreed to the ban amid evidence that he wagered on his own team’s games as manager of the Cincinnati Reds.
Giamatti, MLB commissioner at the time, usually plays a bit role as the “bad cop” in the Rose banishment. A bureaucrat of sorts, he otherwise didn’t get to leave much of a stamp on the game as commissioner since the heavy smoker fell dead from a heart attack a week later.
The former Yale University president and Renaissance literature scholar did leave behind a memorable tome about baseball, however: Take Time for Paradise, his 1989 book published posthumously. Dating myself here and in an admitted humblebrag, I received the book as an award the next year for winning an English class essay contest at my public high school in Pasadena, California . The book holds sentimental value for stoking my interest in making a career as a writer and editor (sometimes more successfully than others). But it also offers life lessons for sports enthusiasts and nonfans alike.
“Bart” Giamatti, as he was known publicly, father of Academy Award-nominated actor Paul Giamatti, peppered the slim (109 pages) book with Greek phrases. Take Time For Paradise alludes to a variety of scholars from Aristotle on who have philosophized on the idea of leisure. The author argues that organized sport constitutes a sort of religious ritual. We do not seek immortality by setting records, he says; it is the communal experience that is paramount. The longing for this Garden of Eden, he suggests, draws us to the ballparks.
The fact that this was written by an academic-turned-baseball commissioner, not an athlete, has stuck with me. Even at the time Giamatti wrote it, sports were big business — and exponentially more so now. But he offers a r omanticization of sports beyond the big bucks’ contracts.
NICHOLAS CLAIRMONT, life & arts editor
In the summer of 2014, fresh out of college, I was hired on the same day along with another guy named Nick to share a job working for a magazine run by the now-columnist for the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead . I was a good liberal with, perhaps, even some Marxist leanings. The other Nick and I made an interesting pair: He was a few years older, a graduate of Oxford, and, more importantly, a staunch conservative. Having grown up in Manhattan, I had never really met one of these, except perhaps in my own imagination. There, they were ignorant or outright nasty people with easily defeated arguments because, in my imagination, they were mere caricatures. But now I shared a room and often a byline with one every day, and we soon came to be debating partners and warm friends.
Fast forward to today, where, as I write this, I must look like a New Yorker cartoon caricature of a right-wing magazine editor since I am writing in a tuxedo perched over an old first edition of Odyssey of a Friend, a collection of Whitaker Chambers ’s letters to William F. Buckley from 1954-1961. The book is a charming record of Chambers wrangling his frustrations, with Buckley’s help, after he worked to bring Communist infiltration of the American government to light, eventually blowing up in the massive Alger Hiss case. In one favorite passage, we find Chambers thanking Buckley for sending him Camus to read, describing him as “stunting in an intellectual glider riding the currents of the tricky, upper air.” Despite the high praise, he likes another recommendation, of Herbert Butterfield, presumably on the “Whig Interpretation of History,” even more.
I found this copy in Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston, South Carolina, on a road trip a few years back. Inscribed inside the front cover in red pen are the words “To Mrs. Richard Hariman, A welcome to middle age from a senior citizen. William F. Buckley.” I like to imagine it’s in red pen because it’s editor’s pen.
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The reason I am in a tuxedo is that later today is the other Nick’s wedding and this book is my gift to him for the occasion. It’s only right, as through the other Nick and an increasing circle of conservatives I’ve been lucky to befriend, I’ve learned something invaluable — namely, that what I blithely thought I knew from adolescence and college as fact back in 2014 was a combination of falsity, narrative that turns out to be much more complicated than that with further reading and thinking, and, sure, fact. At the time I first started hanging around with right-wingers, I would have rejected any information from anyone who’d had anything to do with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a scoundrel and ideologue who I now know nonetheless worked on an identifiably real issue. But over the last decade, I’ve been lucky to lose lots of arguments with conservatives.
Anyway, something else I have learned as my own cohort enters its middle age is that by giving away a treasured old book, you make it only all the more precious.
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