The Old Man and the Kid
The other day, Andrew Patner talked to us about his nifty new book on I.F. Stone. “Our father used to take us down to the library all the time,” he remembered. “And up in the top floor reading room were these huge tables with what now would be called homeless people. They all had black coats and thick white beards with food in them and a bag of bread and they sat there all day and read.
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“And once your book gets in there–! One of the reasons I wrote this book was the complaint that Stone’s not in the libraries. I said I’ll write this book and this book will get in the library and as long as that spine’s there somebody will pull that book down and read it and they’ll say, gee I want to know about this paper.
But Stone had moved on. He’d since taught himself ancient Greek, and Patner found him rooting around in Periclean Athens (his new book, The Trial of Socrates, came out just before Patner’s). To Stone’s delight, “the Greeks were something I both knew about and cared about,” Patner explained.
Patner once worked in radio and enjoyed it, but the printed word is the medium he reveres. “Because it lasts,” he said. “You can go back to it. There’s something about prose on the page. That’s what was so exciting for me with this book. They did such a beautiful job with it–the typography. It seems to have a little more importance than it does in typescript.
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“Finally I came to terms with it. If I only have three sentences to say something, it’s just a different type of writing. And if I put a piece together without any words, it doesn’t mean I’m not a communicator.
