Newspapers are wondrous things. Monuments to impermanence, they have been variously described as the first rough draft of history, or as history shot on the wing. Even at their worst, intoxicated by the thought of power without responsibility, they have an irreducible social and political role. At their best, they deploy an astonishing array of riches before a public which is, in all too many cases, too busy or too pre-occupied to assimilate more than a fraction of what is on offer.
This collection of extracts from The Irish Times not from a calendar year, but from September 1999 to September 2000 - has all the virtues and all the faults of any such collection. I would love to have been a fly on the wall as the choice of excerpts was finalised: there must have been blood on the floor. And every single reader, no matter how much he or she enjoys (as they will enjoy) the seasonal feast here, will have a gripe. Why was so-and-so left out? What about that marvellous picture of the roller-skating horse? (I am making this up.) For my own part, I lament the decision to restrict the catchment area to the paper's writers and photographers. Are writers of the "Letters to the Editor" not also writers of The Irish Times? "Letters to the Editor" is a feature without which The Irish Times would not be, well, The Irish Times.
But gripes, too, are part of what a good newspaper is about. If readers didn't care, they wouldn't gripe. And if newspapers didn't annoy their readers sometimes they wouldn't be doing their job. This mixture of mutual regard and criticism is what makes the red corpuscles flow.
As a newspaper anthology, it raises fascinating issues. How do you best add value to the basic newspaper product? What is the best way of organising into a book the information a newspaper contains? Daily, that information is sectionalised: here it is homogenised, or at least categorised by date of appearance rather than by section of the paper. There are arguments on both sides, but I wonder whether some of these jewels appear to best advantage in this simple chronological setting. It still contains, however, that special feature which is part of the magic of any good newspaper: unpredictability. It also offers, in splendidly permanent form, the opportunity to retrieve much that we had missed first time around, and much that we will continue to savour, like the good vintage stuff it is, until the last drop.
John Horgan is Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University