ENTERTAINMENT

Goodbye from the Books page

Scott Coffman

It is with great sadness that I say goodbye today to the Courier-Journal Books page. Book coverage will continue in the Sunday USA Today Life section each week — I’m sure you’ve noticed my listings promoting it the last few weeks — and the Features section will no doubt cover books and authors of local interest. Still, today is the last day for a weekly, locally created page devoted exclusively to books.

By my feeble math, we’ve had such coverage for over three-quarters of a century (give or take, and in one section of the newspaper or another). Many cities lost similar coverage years ago, but our coverage soldiered on until now, under both the Binghams and Gannett. In my brief tenure, I have tried to honor the legacy of those editors who came before me, while still shaping the page in new and often subtle ways. I was most fortunate to have been given this rare opportunity, and its loss pains me like a limb removed.

Why do I think this is so important? I have a framed quotation on my office wall, and I read it religiously every day. It is from the animated film “Ratatouille,” and was spoken by the arch, terrifying food writer Anton Ego (voiced by the arch and terrifying Peter O’Toole):

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

I hope you have found something to enjoy on this page. And I trust you will continue to befriend the new in The Courier-Journal and at www.courier-journal.com.

Happy reading!
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/books/2014/04/24/goodbye-books-page/8108417/
www.courier-journal.com
CC-MAIN-2023-23
149851
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:334E7WX6IRVKQ7X4KO5PZ4FYUVTLRUL6
<urn:uuid:ca03eea0-1539-4f9f-9792-4ba6bbe5ebd5>
2023-05-29T21:24:47Z
146.75.38.62
text/html
sha1:4OABKUYC3HBQHT6IZ2LJLEHV3RTLLYR7
<urn:uuid:f11f53be-41d0-4bf8-8a3c-dd61f89eff4e>
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/entertainment/books/2014/04/24/goodbye-books-page/8108417/
response
<urn:uuid:b1b5cd8b-7b74-4a6f-a2ce-e29a74d58950>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-23
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-17
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/