When, last spring, the San Francisco Chronicle cut back its books section to save money, incorporating it into another section of the paper, so many readers squealed their contempt that the paper is reinstalling what their readers want.  Come Sunday, October 6, Chronicle readers will find a new, expanded "Book Review" section, a broadsheet stand-alone that will wrap around "Datebook."

In the spring, the book pages were fully incorporated into "Datebook," infuriating people all over the Bay Area who write and read books.  "It was buried in the entertainment section," said poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of the 48-year-old City Lights bookstore.  "So we're just another form of entertainment but not high up in the list.  It was a pretty pathetic book section. ... This is a huge literary community, and we all considered it a real affront, and sort of a slight, to our whole existence."

Senior editor Nardo Zacchino, a former top editor at The Times, wrote to 135 of those who voiced their objections in e-mails, asking for their opinions on possible solutions.  "It's not often that a newspaper will acknowledge that we made a mistake and do something about it.  It took all this time to work out the production issues."

The new Book Review will sport two extra pages and contributions from a newly designated publishing reporter, who will write about the industry for various sections of the paper, Zacchino said.

The writing community and independent publishers and bookstores will be especially pleased about that, Ferlinghetti said.

"We want to have a reporter covering the beat because there's a lot of news out of the publishing industry," Zacchino said. "San Francisco has a large and articulate literary community. The paper's readership deserves for this to be a regular beat of coverage."

Ohhh???

Brian Bouldrey, a former San Francisco-based writer, left town because he felt unappreciated. "Outside of academia, nobody seems interested in reading anymore.  I'm saying this not to generate pity but to present a tough fact: technology and entertainment are leading the way to a sort of glossy, cushy dark age. When people say they want 'the arts' in San Francisco, what they really mean is they want Entertainment – yummy restaurants, Frappuccinos, road companies of Broadway shows, virtual bowling, clubs."

Bouldrey said that the mayor and the city of San Francisco had no apparent interest in nurturing literary, artistic, and creative communities, judging from the disappearance of the literary supplement of the Chronicle, the number of theaters, rehearsal spaces, and galleries sacrificed to the Internet God, and – in a bitter, bitter irony – the proliferation of what are called artists' live-work spaces.

"I suppose that in 5 to 10 years, San Francisco, thriving on amnesia, will one day be affordable to artists again.  I do wish it, and it will happen, and the city may be the site of a revolution in art.   Mark my words: the landowning citizens will despise whoever they are, because they'll make a dirty mess – but it will happen.  I won't be among them, because revolutions are for folks with a lot more energy, and that is no country for old men, and I want to be a hungry artist, not a starving one.  There's only a single flight of stairs up to my office in University Hall.  We've got air-conditioning, and the department secretary does all of my photocopying for me.  I am in a happier place."

That place?  Chicago's Northwestern University, where he currently teaches in the writing program.  Hmmm, we wonder if he read the previous story.

In God (and Writers?) We Trust

According to Joanna Trollope, one of England's most popular novelists, good writing is still admired and emulated, even in these times of electronic digitization.  "Even people who have cast-iron careers in other fields--politicians, movie stars, tennis players--seem to need to write a book, seem to feel driven to leave behind this particular little monument, this testament to the way they thought and spoke -- or wish to have been seen to think and speak," she said in a recent article in the Washington Post.   "But what they forget (Coleridge forgot it too, but, being a near-genius, receives immediate pardon) is that the writers who last, the writers whose writing is indeed their monument, not only have an essential benevolence, a fundamental affection for the human race, but also, more uncomfortably, possess a hefty dose of humility.  Most writers -- all but a very few in fact -- are translators, not inventors, of language, and of life.  It's all in a Jewish saying, really: "Truth rests with God alone.   And a little bit, with me."