I’m almost done reading a book at the apartment I’m staying at in Paris. It’s by a very prominent journalist who spent nearly his entire working career in newspapers, and I’m just powering through it and nodding my head a lot and thinking, “Yep, that’s how it works.”

I was struck by a particular passage. And here it is:

“I began to reflect upon my trade , and to discern some of its principal virtues and defects. Of the latter, the worst was the fact that it worked me too hard, but though I was aware of it I did not resent it, for I was still full of the eagerness of youth, and hot to see the whole show. Of the former, the greatest was that a newspaper man always saw that show from a reserved seat in the first row. The rest of humanity had to wait in line and struggle for places, but not a reporter. He was always expected, and usually welcomed. He got into places by a side door. To this day it always irritates me absurdly to have to stand in line, even for a few minutes — say at a ticket-window or on a customs pier. It seems to me to be an intolerable affront, and not only to my private pomp and circumstance, but also to the honor of the Fourth Estate.”

That passage was written in 1940 by H.L. Mencken, long touted as one of the greats in American journalism history, reflecting on journalism in his youth — around 1900. The book is entitled, “Newspaper Days,” and covers the start of his career, from 1899-1906. He worked until 1948, and died in 1956.

Not much of what Mencken said (above) about journalism’s perks — or its downside, for that matter, the willingness of superiors to let you work yourself to death — changed over the next 100 years. Though it seems to be ebbing, along with newspaper circulation.

We in the print media always got special access, good seats and preferential treatment when it came to the grand pageant that is life, and I wonder if any of us, once we exit the profession (or the profession shows us the door) … will ever get used to life as a civilian.

I doubt it.

A note: I often had heard of Mencken, and how important he was, but I never had read a line of his until coming across this book — which happens to be a first-edition treasure. I find Mencken to be extraordinarily entertaining, and his prose damaged almost not at all by the seven decades or so that intervene between his writing and my reading. Some of the slang he sometimes indulges in leaves me guessing, but his general observations about life still ring true, and his descriptions of the production side of newspapering, back then, are profoundly illuminating. (Such as the startling amount of freedom reporters had, before the era of telephones had taken hold; managers simply couldn’t find them till they walked back in the front door of the newspaper offices.)  Anyway, I recommend him heartily.

Oh, and one free tidbit on Mencken, often known as a misanthrope. His epitaph in a Baltimore cemetery reads,  “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

OK, and one more, a statement of principle that the great journalist — who was vastly suspicious of do-gooders and uplifters, and there were plenty of both during his youth — modestly declared to be “Mencken’s Law.”

“Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”