While perusing the musty cases of Echo: Vintage books and Vinyl downtown, I stumbled upon a fantastic first-edition copy of Pundits, Poets, & Wits: An Omnibus of American Newspaper Columns.
The compendium contains some of the best American sarcasm and commentary you will ever read, all written in the first-person pre-bloggerly mode of the columnist. Featured writers include a conspicuously electric Silence Dogood, Frederick Douglas, Walt Whitman, E.B. White, James Reston, and Dave Barry. The selected pieces are essentially paper-bound blog posts - timely, reactive, and socially engaging - without hyperlinks (although I am quite sure Whitman would have used them if he was able).
Each article is incisive and meticulously crafted, recalling a time when megaphones couldn't afford to be braindead (or at least couldn't publish themselves). The columns are representative of "blogging" before blogging, a small subset of great and accredited minds who generated artful commentary in hearty defiance of today's vox nihili.
Check this book out. You'll like it, I swear. Read the whole thing, a single column or just a few lines. This is American wit at its finest.
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