By MARTIN M. COOPER Guest Columnist The Knight Ridder newspaper chain sells out; staff reductions continue to decimate the Los Angeles Times; while newspapers everywhere are pitied as dinosaurs on the edge of an economic extinction wrought by television, the internet and computer games. And yet, my passion for print endures. It probably started when I was editor of the Mark Twain Junior High School Riverboat. Although my student journalistic career blossomed with editorships of the Venice High School Oarsman and the UCLA Daily Bruin, it was really my high school print shop that injected copious amount of printers’ ink into my veins. More than once, my digits came perilously close to being separated from the rest of my hand by the incessant movement of a now-antiquated platen press. In a UCLA journalism class, Professor Robert Rutland disputed my assertion in my first essay that the still-published Connecticut Courant had a circulation of 8,000 in the Revolutionary War era. “Couldn’t be,” he chastised me, “there wasn’t enough newsprint to produce that many copies of any newspaper in the mid-eighteenth century; where did you get that mistaken idea?” I told him I couldn’t remember where I read it, but I was confident that I was right. He threw down a pedagogic challenge: “You don’t have to take any more tests for the rest of the year; just turn in one paper at year end defending your 8,000 circulation figure. If you convince me, you’ll get an A for the course; if not you’ll get a D.” My semester-long quest for the truth resulted in the discovery that the newspaper publishers’ wife was the daughter of a wealthy Canadian who owned huge tracts of timber source of more than enough paper for a circulation of 8,000 and an A for me! Until recently, books and newspapers had always been more important to me than magazines. That is, until late last year, when United Air Lines informed me that I had amassed sufficient frequent-flyer miles for a round trip to Indio, and wouldn’t I like to receive some terrific magazines to use up those miles? Sounded like a good deal to me (I was never a big fan of Indio, except for the date milkshakes), so I signed up and now I’m inundated: The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Daily Variety, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Time, The Economist, and several more. I sometimes feel I get more magazines than the owner of the newsstand just off Ventura and Topanga Canyon Boulevards in Woodland Hills. As a result, my professional productivity has dwindled to a fraction of its pre-magazine-subscription level, but boy, am I ever smarter! I’ll probably let them all run out, except for The Economist. How can you not love a periodical whose inside masthead proclaims: “First published in September 1843 to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress”? A 163-year-old magazine, and I know of no better coverage of what’s going on in the world today. Here’s your tip of the week from the SFVBJ: buy a copy and see if you love this periodical as much as I do. And then there are the books. I still have my Illustrated Junior Library volumes, one of them inscribed by my mother: “For Marty’s sixth birthday.” And the collection keeps growing. I’m up to something over 2,000 books, with no end in sight. Ray Bradbury, David McCullough, Charles Kuralt, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban, Studs Terkel, and even O.J. Simpson, who I knew and traveled with, are just a few who have inscribed their books to me. Kitty Kelley signed my copy of her book, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography and included her home phone number in case I should ever be in Washington, D.C.! Except for the smell of the first cup of fresh coffee in the morning or a sip of the finest Napa Cabernet, is there a more satisfying sensory experience than that of opening up a new book for the first time and the feeling of regret when one turns the last page? The Barnes & Noble at Hayvenhurst Ave. and Ventura Blvd. and the mail order History Book Club should make me honorary shareholders I’ve invested so heavily in their products. But of course, my prized possessions are my rare editions of some of Winston Churchill’s works. I love the ever-so-slightly yellowed pages with just a bit of foxing, the leather bindings, the faintly musty odor, the feel of them in my hands and most of all the words they contain. So it’s no People, Trailer Life, or Popular Mechanics for me. I’m not going to be reading books on my PDA or computer screen. The New York Times I read online every morning will never replace the real thing not even close, particularly on Sundays. The ancient Pharaohs decreed that they be buried with their greatest possessions, so they could enjoy them in the Afterworld. Makes sense to me. Bury me with my books and the most current issue of The Economist. “I cannot live without books.” Thomas Jefferson, 1815