FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The legendary story of the Arkansas Gazette begins with a printing press floated up the Arkansas River in 1819. Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette: An Oral History (cloth, $34.95), knowledgeably and intimately edited by longtime Gazette and New York Times reporter Roy Reed, tells the newspaper’s story using interviews from over a hundred former Gazette staffers recalling the stories they reported on and the people they worked with from the late 1940s to the paper’s end.

Gazette is inextricably linked with the state’s history, reporting on every major Arkansas event until the paper’s demise in 1991 after a long, bitter and very public newspaper war. Reed’s book is a nostalgic and justifiably admiring look back at a publication known for its progressive stance in a conservative Southern state, a newspaper that, after winning two Pulitzers for its brave rule-of-law stance during the Little Rock Central High Crisis, was considered one of the country’s greatest.

The interviews, collected from archives at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas’ Mullins Library, provide fascinating details on renowned editors and reporters such as Harry Ashmore, Orville Henry and Charles Portis, journalists who wrote daily on Arkansas’ always-colorful politicians, its tragic disasters and sensational crimes, its civil rights crises, Bill Clinton, the Razorbacks sports teams, and much more. Full of humor and little-known details, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette is an absorbing remembrance of a great newspaper.

As Reed writes in his preface to the book: “This is the story of a proud institution peopled by proud journalists, men and women who knew precisely who they were, suffering no latter-day crises of identity. They knew the Arkansas Gazette was not only the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River but also the best paper for hundreds of miles in every direction, famous right around the country and respected by newspaper people from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In Arkansas, even those who hated it were suspected of being quietly proud of it.”

Jack Nelson, retired Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, says the book is “fascinating reading with superb editing and commentary by a terrific writer. Laced with telling and often humorous anecdotes about a period when folks still talked seriously about newspapers having souls.” Gene Roberts, Pulitzer-Prize winning coauthor of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,says the “book ranks with Studs Terkel’s Hard Times and The Good War. Reed brilliantly crafts the story of the rise and fall of one of America’s greatest newspapers.” And from the editor of the Arkansas Times, Max Brantley: “If you were there then, it will make you cry all over again. Even if you weren’t, you still will grieve the state’s loss.”

Roy Reed is also the author of Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal and Looking for Hogeye, both published by the University of Arkansas Press. Reed was an Arkansas Gazette reporter for eight years before becoming a national and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and then a longtime professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas. The Walter J. Lemke Department of Journalism’s Roy Reed Lecture Series is named in his honor.

April 20 at the Clinton School of Public Service, 1200 President Clinton Avenue, Little Rock, 6:00 p.m; April 25 at the Arkansas Historical Association’s annual meeting in Magnolia; April 29 in Giffels Auditorium, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 3:00 p.m;  May 16 at Nightbird Books, 205 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville, 6:00 p.m; and June 19 at the Fort Smith Public Library, 3201 Rogers Avenue, Fort Smith, 12:00 p.m.