Terry Prone: While laying a conspiracy theory to rest, let’s bring back media impartiality

Originally published in the Irish Examiner.

Nothing can ever be quite as sad as the books to be found in thrift shops, testifying, as they do, to the death of a generation of readers. A handful of recent thrillers may appear, but for the most part, what crowd the shelves are bunches of old — sometimes very old — books. 

Guessing the age of the previous owners doesn’t even require a potential purchaser to open the title page to view dedications wishing someone a happy birthday, with a 20th century year underneath. 

Eye-scanning the spines is enough. 

They capture the writer names from a specific time: Nevil Shute, Paul Gallico, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Compton Mackenzie, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck. They are enough to demonstrate that these are the remains of an abandoned library, stuffed into a black plastic bag by a bereaved son or daughter and handed over to be sold piecemeal at a euro a go.

Sometimes, the books are non-fiction. Old blue Pelicans about the sociology of the 1960s. Vance Packard on the manufacturing/marketing culture of that time. Or a collection from various authors about the investigation into the assassination of US president John F Kennedy. The official report of the Warren Commission, its pages yellowed and crisped with age, alongside paperback alternative theories around the event. And then, the definitive hardback conspiracy-theory-squelcher, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed.

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