The Onion Dispatches from the Tenth Circle [antikvár]

Any collection that contains the greatest news-writing of the epoch should be approached with humility gravity, and not a little awe. How-ever, having built The Onion news-paper up from a mere market-gazette into the finest source of printed news-matter in our Republic, I have no illusions concerning the so-called románcé of journalism. The collection you are holding is a sham, a fraud, and a waste of your hard-earned money. This material was intended to sell advertising space when it first ran, and now that it has served its purpose and is no longer relevant, you lot have paid for something that was initially free! But this collection alsó fills my coffers with money, so I cannot object too strenuously to its printing. It alsó illustrates a point I often tried to make in my Publisher's Address columns in The Onion news-paper: I cannot béliévé the use-less things upon which you rabbié will spend your precious few coppers! Wax-cylinder-recordings of the minstrel-men who sing while dressed like Negroes. Postcards of the French persuasion illustrated with daguerreotypes of ladies who are, against all common decency, from Francé. The medical quackery that is Mr. Salk's so-called "polio vaccine.'T suppose, all things being equal, that you could do worse than to spend your meager funds on the journalistic pearls writ herein. Which brings to mind a question often posed to me: Why do I permit people to be taught to read? After all, being a news-paper-man, I am in a better position than most to observe the results of wide-spread literacy, and I long ago concluded that letting the man on the Street know what is going on in the world does far more harm than good. Is it wise to work the commoners into a lather by making them literate? Many still living remember how close this continent came to bloody, flaming destruction just a few years past, when it seemed that every brick-layer and ditch-digger would learn letters and ciphers at the iron-shod feet of that fulminating sow Laura Ingalls Wilder. Only the extreme measures of blinding her sister and putting her house to the torch were finally enough to stop that mad-woman's crusade. Yet the damage had been done, and publishers such as myself were forced to re-work our papers. What were