The column started as an outlet for literary news and respectable literary gossip, and it fulfilled that function, more or less, throughout its life. Publishers invited Isabel Paterson to their parties; they sent her news releases; they wrote, called, and visited her, trying to put the right spin on their products; and they advertised their wares on the pages next to her column. Paterson loved to draw her audience’s attention to the inanities that emerged when they set themselves to solemn meditations on their work. She began the column with becoming modesty, advancing bland literary judgments, making little jokes about being a “worm,” et cetera. Even in the first column, however, the combative Paterson began to show, when she answered an author who had a complaint against the Herald Tribune by suggesting that “publicity will soothe” him.