“Friend, You Stand on Sacred Ground: ‘THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE'”

From Connecting, a newsletter for current and former AP staffers:

By Chris Sullivan

The excellent novel “News of the World,” by Paulette Jiles, is about a character in 1870s Texas who goes from one isolated frontier town to another and holds evening readings of news stories that he selects from newspapers he gets from big cities on the East coast and even as far away as London; the character is based on a real-life news `aggregator’ of this kind. At one point, he stops in a newsagent’s shop in Dallas and notes this sign on the wall:

“THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE. Refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time. ARMORY OF FEARLESS TRUTH AGAINST ALL WHISPERING RUMOR. INCESSANT TRUMPETER OF TRADE. From this place words may fly abroad NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND, NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND, BUT FIXED IN TIME, HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF. Friend, you stand on sacred ground. THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE.”

The protagonist next goes to the Dallas Weekly Courier office “to sit with their Morse operator and take news from the AP wire. The fee was reasonable. The wire from Arkansas and points east was still operating. The Comanche and Kiowa had learned to cut the wire and then repair it with horsehair so that it would not transmit but no one could tell where it had been cut. They well knew Army orders came over the telegraph wires.”