Joseph Skibell's Plea to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Along with the CNN, C-Span, Fox News cameras, print reporters, independent bookstore owners, authors, readers and critics (including NBCC president John Freeman, who delivered the NBCC's online petition with nearly 5,000 signatures to Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor Julia Wallace), award winning novelist and Emory professor Joseph Skibell was on hand at today's demontration protesting the elimination of the book review editor's position at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He shares his remarks:

The Nazis knew how important books were to a free and liberal society – and that’s why they burned them. The Soviets as well. Not only were books suppressed in Stalinist Russia, but writers were rounded up and shot. The Soviets believed writers were simply too dangerous to the system. You see this again and again. Whenever a despot comes to power, the first people to go are the writers.

In America, however, we silence our writers in another way. We silence them through indifference. We claim that their only function is entertain us, and then we complain that they’re boring. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, writing – literature – books – is less important than the crime beat in Marietta or Gwinnett or the Buckhead Society page.

No books are burned, no writers are murdered by the state, but through this great and terrible indifference – through this terrible belittling of the Western Intellectual Tradition – a tradition based upon the importance and primacy of books – based upon the importance of ideas in books – of ideas circulating through books – our basic freedoms are eroded and, in this case, willingly surrendered – and here surrendered by the fifth estate, by the newspapers whose job it is not only to report the news, but to reflect a city back to itself.

If Atlanta is the capital of the New South, is that a south that doesn’t need its books? A south that doesn’t needs its universities? A south that doesn’t need intellectual inquiry and discussion? Is all that only for New York? I don’t think so. A society that denigrates books, is a society that denigrates free thought, and a society that denigrates free thought is a society that ultimately denigrates freedom.

I urge the Atlanta Journal Constitution to reconsider its decision to eliminate its Book Editor. More is at stake than just one talented woman’s job. More is at stake than just the latest reviews of the newest detective novel. Our very sense of who we are is at stake. We can either stand with the Nazis and the Soviets and the Taliban – who destroyed books and burned them and belittled them – or we can stand with the Jeffersons and the Franklins and the Whitmans and the Faulkners who knew that a book – that funny little oblong object – is perhaps all that keeps a society, a city, a nation free.--Joseph Skibell