Joseph Mitchell’s fascinating and delightful mid-century reporting — for the long-defunct Morning World, Herald Tribune, and World-Telegram newspapers, and, finally, for The New Yorker — has us yearning for his saltier, scrappier New York. Mitchell’s forte was in shadowing marginal characters (“…the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats,” in the words of one profile subject Joe Gould) and expanding on their obsessions (whiskey, clam digging) at length, a format captured in these Random House reissues of three of his greatest works.