The Lede review: Calvin Trillin on the golden age of American reporting

For decades, Calvin Trillin has been one the most celebrated journalists in New York. This splendid collection of his pieces is filled with reminders of what makes him special: he is equally good at the serious stuff and “pieces meant to amuse”.

The press is the subject that knits these stories together. It occurred to Trillin that these articles “amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like” since he entered the game. Many are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. They provide the flavor of the glory days of print journalism, when newsstands were stuffed with magazines and papers written by giants like Murray Kempton, Molly Ivins and Edna Buchanan – and giants in their own minds, like RW Apple Jr – each of whom gets their due here, in Trillin’s 32nd book.

His title, The Lede, is the coin of the realm for every old-fashioned scribbler. Trillin sets the tone on page four:

A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers that she bit the 600-pound animal’s genitalia after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog.

Every good lede leaves the reader with a certain amount of mystery. Trillin points to this one: “While the veterinarian was caring for the camel, was anyone attending to that Florida woman?”

The book is replete with the best lines of other journalists but Trillin’s phrases are the funniest, like the one he wrote after Time Warner announced that the magazine that gave the company half its name was to be “spun off – a phrase that to me has always conjured up a business enterprise caught in the final cycle of a giant washing machine, with desks and office