OP: Wayward Reporter (hardcover)

Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1980. Hardcover. Very Good. First printing.

Abbot Joseph Liebling (1904–1963), a long-time staffer at The New Yorker, is regarded by many as one of the finest journalistic stylists of his time. He wrote about everything in the world that caught his attention: boxing (the only regular columnist the magazine ever had on that subject), politics, and the triumphs and foibles of the press. And as The New Yorker ’s war correspondent, he covered the Normandy Invasion in 1944. 

But what A.J. Liebling wrote about most enthusiastically was the world of food. In Paris as a young man, he discovered the joys of good eating, which he documented memorably in one of our shop’s all-time best-selling books, Between Meals (1962—and still in print). 

It is fitting, therefore, that a biography of Liebling should have been written by Raymond Sokolov, an accomplished journalist himself and former restaurant critic for The New York Times. This is a lively, richly anecdotal book about a colorful character, who ate and drank on an almost superhuman scale—not as a glutton nor, on the other hand, as an over-refined aesthete. 

Liebling knew about food and wine and appreciated both as others might enjoy old movies or relish dressing up and going dancing. Sokolov captures him appealingly and serves us a host of his better lines, noting that when in Normandy, Liebling encountered a partridge dish that he said, “tasted as if the partridge had been fed all its life from a bottle of Calvados fifty years old.” This book is a treat—and was one of store founder Nach Waxman’s personal favorites.

The copy on offer is a first printing in Very Good condition. Both the dust jacket and the front free endpaper are clipped. The FFEP also bears a gift inscription.