“Where are the reporters of yesteryear?” a character asks in Annie Proulx’s novel “The Shipping News.” “The nail biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?” Some of them are here, filing drunkenly on deadline and then vomiting onto their editors’ desks, in a lively and sprawling new book, “Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of The New York Post, 1976-2024,” by Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo.

This isn’t a celebration of the Post, exactly, because from some perspectives there’s not much to celebrate. Since Rupert Murdoch took control of the tabloid in early 1977, it has been homophobic and race-baiting. The Post cheapened journalistic standards by routinely inventing quotes and facts. It was one of Murdoch’s early media purchases in America, and its chortling tone and frothing-at-the-mouth politics paved the way for another of his products, Fox News.

On the other hand, the Post committed a lot of good journalism, and what a guilty pleasure it has been. Page Six, its flagship gossip column, was a must-read for decades. The Post broke umpteen political stories, as well as the Sydney Biddle Barrows, aka Mayflower Madam, scandal, and Woody Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi Previn, after a source told the Post that Allen was seen making out with her behind the bleachers at a New York Knicks game.

The Post’s headlines, when they clicked, detonated over Gotham. “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” is the best known, but this book reminds us of many other read-this-or-die heads, including “THE HUNK FLUNKS” (after John F. Kennedy Jr. failed the New York bar exam), “AXIS OF WEASEL” (after France and Germany opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq), “BIMBO SUMMIT” (above a photograph of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton), “BAD HEIR DAY” (about the son of Brooke Astor), many headlines about the woes of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer (“HERE WE HO AGAIN”) and former Rep. Anthony Weiner, about whom the double and triple entendres invented themselves.

Post headline connoisseurs sometimes found the best ones buried inside. Filmmaker John Waters tells the authors that his favorite Post headline appeared after Ike Turner died. It read: “IKE BEATS TINA TO DEATH.”

If you remember the Preppy Killer, the Queen of Mean, the Dapper Don, the Subway Vigilante and the Bess Mess (look these up yourself, kids, as the Post’s longtime gossip columnist Cindy Adams might put it), you were probably reading the Post. It was what you devoured on the subway, if you were not a Daily News reader, before you had a cellphone. You read The New York Times on the subway only if you knew origami.

The paper’s blue-collar, man-on-the-street sensibility was cut with a knowing interest in the machinations of political consultants, media elites and sports team owners. It made for a jolting, high-low brew.

This book’s title, “Paper of Wreckage,” comes from a nickname staffers had for the Post, because it was anything but a paper of record. Most of the wreckage was behind the scenes. In movies about newspapers, Mulcahy and DiGiacomo write, we’re used to seeing “conscience-stricken men and women; shirt sleeves rolled, ties and hair askew, pounding their fists on conference tables and arguing passionately about getting the facts right.”

The Post, conversely, “was more like ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’: One editor wore devil horns and sent panties to female staffers through interoffice mail. A brilliant headline writer strode through the office — and atop newsroom desks — barefoot, chucking trash cans across the newsroom when he was angry, muttering, ‘The revolution is coming.’”On one New Year’s Eve, Rosemary Clooney arrived to sing “Auld Lang Syne” on a desktop. On a different day, the voluptuous B-movie actress Edy Williams, whom Rex Reed called an “aging sexpot” in a film review, came into the office with a boom box and did a striptease to prove she still had it going on.

Fistfights, drug deals, sex in stairwells, debauched Christmas parties and memories of mobbed-up employees are recounted. A daily newspaper is like a play where you must strike the set every night. Post employees preferred to burn it down.

The Post’s most infamous journalist was the pugnacious and hard-drinking Australian Steve Dunleavy. The stories about him are worth the admission price.

He pretended to be a grief counselor to get an exclusive interview with the mother of the last victim of David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer, and may have slept with her. Once, rumor had it, he was having sex in a snowbank outside Elaine’s with the fiance of one of his editors. The two of them were struck by a snowplow.The Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. It’s the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the country. “Paper of Wreckage” begins in 1976, when the Post was still owned by Dorothy Schiff, the granddaughter of financier Jacob Schiff. It was an afternoon paper, liberal and almost genteel.

When Murdoch’s pirate crew of Australian journalists arrived, it was as if, a former reporter says, Sid Vicious had taken over the Philharmonic. Out the window went many journalist norms, and the old guard quit in large numbers.

Among the paper’s low points was its racist and sensationalized coverage of the Central Park jogger case, which lawyer Ronald L. Kuby now refers to as the Exonerated Five case. Roy Cohn and his protege Donald Trump were constant, malevolent, self-interested tipsters. American journalism is living in the bombastic, Newsmaxed world the Post helped create.

Many good journalists passed through the Post, including Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Nora Ephron. Some would go on to work at the Times, including Anna Quindlen, Frank Rich, Maggie Haberman and Frank Bruni. Most have fond memories; they enjoyed the chaos.

The Post is still breathing, but its circulation and influence have declined in the internet age. Forgive me if I’ve spoken of it in the past tense. I finally banned it from my house a few years ago because, while I like a good conservative argument, its hard-right politics became too omnipresent and braying. This book suggests the possibility that the paper might shut down after Murdoch, who is 93, dies.

Mackenzie Dawson, who edited the Post’s book coverage from 2005 through 2023, gets off one of the best lines. “I always felt,” she says, “like the Post covered New York like it was an opera.”