Notes and Asides

Andrew Ferguson, at the Wall Street Journal, reviews WFB's latest collection:

...One reason the old New Yorker magazine--the one with A.J. Liebling and E.B. White--was so unusual was that it refused to print letters to the editor at all, thus making the editor's disdain utterly transparent. (The magazine didn't run corrections, either.) The message was unmistakable, and you could almost hear it through the lockjaw of that foppish, monocle-wearing Eustace Tilley on the cover: "It seems scarcely possible, dear reader, that any letter you write could be of any interest to us whatsoever. We write, you read." So just be still and go back to that eight-part series on glaciers.

Another nervy, equally admirable approach was conceived by William F. Buckley Jr. In addition to his duties as columnist, TV talk-show host, lecturer, novelist and Manhattan boulevardier, Mr. Buckley was founder and, for 35 years, the editor of the magazine National Review. In this role, as in others, he was an innovator. Instead of merely parking all the letters to the editor in a few pages at the front, in the editorial equivalent of a mud room, he set aside a special department in the middle of the magazine to showcase the ones that caught his eye. And then, more often than not, he would gut the letter writer right there on the printed page. At NR the letters page became an abattoir.

Mr. Buckley called his department "Notes and Asides," and he has now gathered between hard covers a "best of" collection culled from the years 1967 through 2005, when the department was discontinued. In "Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription," we find the whole range of letters to the editor: complaints and condescending jibes, lame jokes and wry observations, galloping know-it-all-ism and--always a favorite of letter writers--nitpicking...