bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Between the Acts: Library Services to Schools from 1919 to 1944
Authors: Bloomfield Mark A.
Published: March 2008

IT CAN STILL BE SAID, after forty‐eight years have passed, that ‘little has yet been written of the history of school libraries, for indeed the history is still in the making’. Progress in the provision of library services to schools has been slow and piece‐meal until recently, and Alec Ellis's contribution to the history of public library services to children in England and Wales is not yet complete. One must search inter alia to find other contributions to the history of this subject for the period since the First World War. To look at the past is not for the purpose of decrying the present in the manner of the ‘Black Papers’ on education, but to measure the extent and direction of change.
The Variety of Dickens's “Bleak House”
Authors: Green Muriel M.
Published: March 2008

CHARLES DICKENS'S immense popularity when his novels first appeared in weekly and monthly parts, and his continuing popularity today is due, above all, to his skill in creating memorable characters whose fortunes the reader compulsively follows. His characters show their creator's remarkable powers of observation, particularly in small details, so that the reader constantly stops to think, ‘How true to life!’ or ‘How like old so‐and‐so!’ Many of them were based on real people—his father (Mr Micawber), his mother (Mrs Nickleby), himself (David Copperfield), but they are so transmuted that the originals did not recognize themselves. In Bleak House he had to modify his sketch of Harold Skimpole, who was too recognizably Leigh Hunt.
A Tidy Collection of Filial Biographies
Authors: Bauer Harry C.
Published: March 2008

IF SONS DID NOT EXTOL, many a worthy father would sink into oblivion and forever go unsung. As filial biographers, however, sons customarily meet with intimidating scorn and derision. There is a generally accepted notion that consanguineous biography is fraught more with fealty and filial frailty than with disinterested depiction. The best way to disprove this false assumption is to muster meritorious biographies written by scions and compare them with representative biographies of the ‘blame and blemish’ variety. Sympathetic assessment always stands up stronger than ostensible objectivity, for writers of the ‘warts and all’ kind of biography lose track of virtues and nearly always become engrossed in the imperfections of their victims.
Robin Jenkins
Authors: Burgess Moira
Published: March 2008

‘IT MIGHT BE SUGGESTED’, wrote George Blake in 1956, introducing the BBC radio‐drama series Annals of Scotland, ‘that Robin Jenkins is potentially the most interesting of the younger Scottish novelists’. Nor has the potential gone unrealized: in October 1969 he received a Scottish Arts Council publication award of £300 for his most recent book, The Holy Tree. On that occasion the Scotsman critic remarked that Jenkins ‘should need less introduction than one feels he does’, and this summarizes the paradox which must for long enough now have been troubling his admirers. Jenkins, besides being a prolific and highly praised novelist, is a remarkably neglected one.
Conservation and the Poet
Authors: Brill Barbara
Published: March 2008

FRANK FRASER DARLING, in his compelling Reith lectures ‘Wilderness and Plenty’ that heralded European Conservation Year, warned us of the dangers of pollution and over‐population. He spoke of overcrowding as ‘a depressant of beauty…and of the romantic spirit which is the pearl of our human heritage’. This romantic spirit that is manifested through our poets, writers, artists and musicians, seems to me to have been overlooked in the welter of propaganda that has been poured out, with the emphasis primarily on the scientific aspects of conservation.
New Light on Hardy's ‘Panthera’
Authors: Bath M.E.
Published: March 2008

IN 1909 THOMAS HARDY published in Time's Laughingstocks a poem called ‘Panthera’. It is not a poem which has attracted much attention, though unusual and interesting in many re‐spects. It is a dramatic monologue, the opening of which seems a deliberate attempt to imitate the idiomatic abruptness of some of Browning's better‐known monologues:
A Reader of ‘Little Pretty Pocket Books’
Authors: Abbott Dorothea M.
Published: March 2008

IN The Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck there are some amusing recollections of her childhood, covering the years 1778 to 1793, when as Mary Anne Galton she lived with her parents at Barr Hall, South Staffordshire.
Two Miners' Libraries in the '70s
Authors: Crawford John
Published: March 2008

THE NOW DEFUNCT READING SOCIETIES of Leadhills and Wanlockhead made a valuable contribution to library history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the libraries they amassed and the buildings they erected still exist, and their recent history, present state and possible future demonstrate important aspects of the problems of preserving old libraries.
The Science and the Fiction
Authors: Johnson Gordon
Published: March 2008

IT WAS QUITE AN EVENT when the Americans brought off that tremendous gamble in 1969 and succeeded in landing two men on the moon and bringing them safely back. It was even more of an event to find science‐fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury and Brian Aldiss brought specially on to TV programmes to add their comments on this feat. Ten or twenty years ago, this would have seemed ridiculous, an unheard‐of thing, as science‐fiction writers were obviously just pie‐in‐the‐sky dreamers who wrote imaginative rubbish!
In an Old Persian Library
Authors: Day A.E.
Published: March 2008

FOR ALL THEIR RENOWNED ZEAL I doubt whether many research workers in modern times have equalled the courage and tenacity, the single‐minded purposefulness of Avicene, the noted Persian scholar, who braved all manner of dangers and defied the guardian spirits of the Red Mountain so that he might have access to the material he required for his studies.
A Notable Scottish Bookman
Authors: Collingwood Frances
Published: March 2008

GRIT AND FORTITUDE have long been associated with the Scottish character, but it is doubtful if any Scotsman ever won through to success after such a grim struggle, as did Robert Chambers who died a century ago on March 17th.
Towards a ‘G. & S.’ Bibliography
Authors: Joseph Tony
Published: March 2008

I SUPPOSE that anyone writing anything on Gilbert and Sullivan ought to begin by stating where he stands in regard to the works of this extraordinary pair. For ‘G. & S.’ is curious. It can perhaps be likened to cricket in that people tend either passionately to love it or as passionately to loathe it; neutrality is encountered relatively seldom. So let me say straight away that I come into the former category. H.M.S. Pinafore and all the other operas in the series have given me enormous pleasure for as long as I can remember, and I hope and believe they will continue to do so in the future.
London Fiction
Authors: Hutton Muriel
Published: March 2008

ONE MUST BEGIN with Dickens. A chapter by Christopher Hibbert in Charles Dickens, 1812–1870: centenary volume, edited by E. W. F. Tomlin, and The London of Charles Dickens, published by London Transport with aid from the Dickens Fellowship, make a similar study here superfluous; both are illustrated, the latter giving instructions for reaching surviving Dickensian buildings. Neither warns the reader of Dickens's conscious and unconscious imaginative distortion, considered in Humphrey House's The Dickens World. Dickens himself imagined Captain Cuttle hiding in Switzerland and Paul Dombey's wild waves saying ‘Paris’; ‘the association between the writing and the place of writing is so curiously strong in my mind.’ Author and character may be in two places at once. ‘I could not listen at my fireside, for five minutes to the outer noises, but it was borne into my ears that I was dead.’ (Our Mutual Friend)
Children's Books in the 'Nineties
Authors: Holehouse Katharine
Published: March 2008

IT IS STRANGE how a sentence read in childhood can persist in the memory, by reason of some sentiment or overtone of glamour. One would expect the after weight of more solid literature to crush it from existence, but ‘bright is the ring of words’ to the child new to their power, and the reverberation may last a lifetime. My father confessed he could not read a simple tale of his early childhood without a lump in his throat at the remembered crisis, when the little boy, saved by his dog, cries, ‘Caesar, my dear Caesar, if it had not been for you I should this day have been eaten up by wolves!’ But I throw no stones, remembering the end of The Cuckoo Clock.
Smocks, Steam, and Dant'
Authors: Campion Sarah
Published: March 2008

MASSEYVILLE, ONT., heads the list of those places in the late British Empire where I hope never to return. The city bears out R. T. Glover's verdict on another part of Canada: ‘One could live there for the sake of a dear one—but it would certainly temper bereavement.’ However, it is to Masseyville that I do return, in 1943, fate and necessity together having called my bluff of ‘Will Go Anywhere, Do Anything'.’
Books for a Desert Island
Authors: Day A.E.
Published: March 2008

FOR MANY YEARS PAST Roy Plomley has persuaded all kinds of people, celebrities every one, but not all of them just transient showbiz personalities hurtling like meteors across the firmament, to enter one of the BBC's studios and there, to the strains of Eric Coates's Blue Lagoon and the cries of sea‐birds, to confide into the microphone the gramophone records they would choose to have with them if they were marooned on a desert island. Week in, week out, listeners have been rewarded with snippets of autobiography, a little amateur philosophy, and sometimes a dabble or two in psychology, accompanied at suitable intervals by a record highspotting significant (or even insignificant) events in the prospective castaway's life. Now I would agree that music is without question the most evocative of the arts, but I would make a strong plea for literature to be regarded as a close second. Why not ‘Desert Island Bookshelf’? After all, the most famous of shipwrecked mariners, Robinson Crusoe, had the benefit of a not inconsiderable library on his island: no fewer than three Bibles, a few Popish prayer‐books, a few books of navigation, some books in Portuguese, and a number of others unspecified. Of course, there would be an odds‐on chance of hearing the latest over‐developed, over‐peroxided Hollywood starlet assure Mr Plomley that of all the Greek classics the one she read most often was little old Plato's Republic. But then every silver lining has a grey cloud attached to it somewhere or other.
Bibliographic Allusions in Book Titles
Authors: Bauer Harry C.
Published: March 2008

LET'S VARY LITERACEE with a little bibliographic burglaree. If you suddenly feel like humming The Pirates of Penzance or recollecting Gilbert and Sullivan, you are closely attuned to the bibliographic thoughts in my mind. Literary allusions are the rich overtones that make reading and writing a grand collaboration and a happy pursuit. An author may conscientiously write to convey ideas, but if a cut above the average, he always strives as did H. L. Mencken to express his ideas ‘in suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song’. His creative efforts will be mostly wasted, however, if his readers lack the requisite literary background and sophistication that would enable them to join in his game and share his earnest effusions. Literacy is never enough; a young child can read and understand the six one‐syllable words ‘who steals my purse, steals trash’, but that same child can grow to be a mighty old man without ever fully comprehending the sentence unless he reads Othello and studies Iago's presumptuous remarks on ‘Good name in man and woman’.
Hindsgavl 1972
Authors: Snodgrass G.L.M.
Published: March 2008

THE LOUGHBOROUGH SUMMER SCHOOL (an international course in children's literature) was held this year at Hindsgavl Castle in Denmark. It proved to be a most attractive location and our Danish hosts ensured that it was an interesting and enjoyable conference.
The Naval Historical Library
Authors: Cecil Hampshire A.
Published: March 2008

HIGH ABOVE THE HOTELS and bed‐sitters of London's Earl's Court district towers the Ministry of Defence's twenty‐eight storey Empress State Building. On the twenty‐fifth floor of this imposing edifice is housed the largest and finest naval library in the world. It comprises more than a hundred and twenty‐five thousand books, over a hundred thousand pamphlets, a magnificent collection of charts and atlases, and some four‐hundred‐odd manuscripts. The whole collection is probably worth more than £1 million.
Discovering the Oldest Publick Bibliotheck of the Northern Isles
Authors: Kaufman Paul
Published: March 2008

TODAY the northernmost community library in Britain is the County Library of the Shetlands, with its headquarters at Lerwick, the county town, which was preceded by a series of vigorous organizations for more than a century. But for over a hundred years the Publick Bibliotheck at Kirkwall was not only the oldest but the farthest north in all Britain. The founder was William Baikie, member of a leading family and proprietor of the estate of Holland in the island of Stronsay in the Orkneys. Born about 1638, he probably attended the very old Grammar School in Kirkwall, he was a student at the University of Edinburgh in 1656 and proceeded m.a. in the next year. A relative, Rev. Thomas Baikie, minister first of the ‘second charge’ of Kirkwall and a zealous student, apparently influenced the young man toward a life in the church, but the opportunities near home were few. Orcadians were loath to move to the mainland, and besides William's inherited properties were substantial. So he spent his life as a respected heritor and collector of books.
H. F. Cary: The Librarian Friend of Lamb and Coleridge
Authors: Abbott Dorothea M.
Published: March 2008

1972 saw the bicentenary of the only librarian to have been buried in Westminster Abbey. He lies close to Samuel Johnson in Poets' Corner, the words ‘Translator of Dante’ on his tomb.
A Visit to the Libraries of Metropolitan Toronto
Authors: Wood George J.
Published: March 2008

SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF LIBRARIANS throughout the world have become aware of the libraries of Toronto during the course of their early professional studies; many British librarians, indeed, have gained first‐hand knowledge through taking part in the internee scheme of Toronto Public Library. The wealth of the collections of Toronto Central Library and the pioneer work of Boys and Girls House have become legendary in our profession. During a private visit to Canada in July and August 1971 I satisfied a long‐standing ambition by making a pilgrimage to the libraries in Toronto and saw something of the significant developments that have been taking place there recently.
Stephen Crane—A Distant Echo
Authors: Bland James
Published: March 2008

FEW BOOKS have been so enthusiastically received in England as The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane's novel of the American Civil War. In December 1895 it was welcomed unanimously by authors and critics alike, and caused a good deal of public excitement. The book arrived in England, in the words of Joseph Conrad, ‘with the impact of a twelve‐inch shell’. It has since come to be regarded as one of the most significant books in the development of modern American literature.
Dial‐Information Retrieval Centres
Authors: Morrison Charles M.
Published: March 2008

This paper was read at the Library Association Conference, Resource Centres in Schools, at Loughborough University of Technology in October 1971. It describes some of the more sophisticated American Resource Centres and deals with a situation a step or two away from general practice in this country. The author reports what he saw and how the centres are used, and so perhaps suggests both where and where not to aim in developing Resource Centres here.
The Walter de la Mare Centenary
Authors: Collingwood Frances
Published: March 2008

WALTER DE LA MARE, the centenary of whose birth falls on 25th April, was a master of English prose as well as being the supreme lyric poet of his age in the tradition of Campion, Herrick and Bridges. Yet it is difficult to compare him with anyone who has gone before, so highly individual was his work.
Three Peas in a Pod: A Hero and Two Heroines
Authors: Werkley Caroline E.
Published: March 2008

ANDREW CARNEGIE would have liked my mother, who for many years presided over one of his public libraries, but I am not sure he would have cottoned to me. Mother, after all, had many of the traits of his mother, whom he adored, and she also shared some of his own qualities. The only things Mr Carnegie and I would have had in common were strong‐minded mothers—Margaret Carnegie was said to be the one person whose will was never bent in surrender to her son—and the fact that we both at one time took elocution lessons. Also, each of us had our earlier literary work published in Sunday School papers.
Hasted's Kent
Authors: Collins Barbara E.
Published: March 2008

KENT is one of the more beautiful of England's counties and one of the richest in ancient history. From the days of early invasions it has been in the forefront of national progress, habitation and culture; the number of family seats and landed gentry estates increased each decade, and by the eighteenth century Kent was among the premier parts chosen as a place of residence for the aristocracy, and those wishing to join that select circle. No contemporary history of that period was complete without reference to the families responsible for building the many lovely houses, landscaping the fallow countryside and populating the busy county towns.
History in the Library of Winchester Cathedral
Authors: Udal John
Published: March 2008

THE PLACE Whitehall; the time 29 October 1618. An ageing man with a grey beard stands on a scaffold. He asks to see the axe that will behead him.
The Americanization of English
Authors: Edgar James
Published: March 2008

WHEN WE ARE TALKING TO AMERICANS it is the differences in usage, pronunciation and vocabulary, rather than the similarities, which first strike us. But today nobody imagines that these differences could eventually result in two demonstrably dissimilar languages, as distinct (say) as Dutch and Afrikaans.
A Department of Dead Ends
Authors: Hay Daniel
Published: March 2008

THE WHITEHAVEN PUBLIC LIBRARY, in common with most municipal public libraries, has built up over the years a fairly comprehensive collection of books and pamphlets on the history of the community and surrounding area which answer most local queries, but in addition there are notebooks and letter files that form a sort of department of dead ends, queries that have petered out. Families die out and their personal papers are destroyed, or they move away and take their records with them; accidents happen to church records so that there is a gap of greater or lesser magnitude just at the point at which one is interested. There are dozens of ways in which one can come up against a stone wall, and find further progress impossible. Then some time later, sometimes years later, a clue or the answer will turn up.
Which Report?
Authors: Whatley Allan
Published: March 2008

To come across references to my earlier reviews in some of the annual reports for 1971–2 is sufficient indication that these articles are noticed by colleagues and encourages me to develop the series.
Bradbury and Asimov: A Contrast
Authors: Johnson Gordon
Published: March 2008

BOTH BRADBURY AND ASIMOV write science fiction. That statement is like saying that both the Financial Times and the News of the World are newspapers; they are worlds apart. However, the contrast between the two may give some idea of the range in ideas, attitudes and approach to their subject.
Robert Duncan Macleod 1885–1973
Authors: Macleod R.D.
Published: March 2008

R. D. MACLEOD'S career can be summarized briefly. Born in Greenock, he joined the staff of the public library there in 1902. He moved to Glasgow and was a district librarian in Hutchesontown and Anderston before his appointment in 1915 as librarian to the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, with responsibility for their pioneer North of Scotland scheme. In 1921 he joined Messrs W. & R. Holmes, booksellers in Glasgow, as consulting librarian, and he retired from the firm as a director in December 1963. One of the first to bring the professional skill of the librarian into the world of bookselling, to the end he considered himself a librarian.
‘My Biographer, if I ever have one…’
Authors: Day A.E.
Published: March 2008

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON would have delighted in the deep irony of his own idle words, penned in a letter to William Archer in October 1887. His early death in Samoa, itself a symbolic reflection of an incredibly romantic life, short but full of incident and perfectly constructed for journalistic highlighting, inspired a spate of fulsomely admiring biographical studies which at one time threatened to obscure his true talent. Essay upon essay, book after book, some merely appreciative, some approaching adulation, poured from the presses until literary criticism proper was engulfed in a myth of quite extraordinary dimensions.
Le Grand Larousse
Authors: Clifford Anthony D.
Published: March 2008

PIERRE‐ATHANASE LAROUSSE is best known as the co‐founder, in 1852, of the publishing house which has produced a wide range of encyclopedias and dictionaries. His greatest work, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, provides the main source of biographical information. He was born at Toucy, Yonne, on 23 October 1817, the son of a blacksmith. A model student at the local elementary school, he obtained a scholarship when he was seventeen and completed his studies at Versailles. Three years later he became head of a school at Toucy, but was disgusted with current teaching methods. In 1840, aged 22, he gave up his post and went to Paris, where he remained ten years. He led the life of a poor student, feeding mainly on bread and onion soup. He continued his studies at centres of learning such as the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, the Observatoire, and the Muséum, all the time collecting material which was later to be used in his encyclopedic works.
The Rural Community Library in Scotland
Authors: Crawford John
Published: March 2008

MANY of the parish and community libraries of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were subscription libraries, as this was the best way for people of limited means to amass and maintain reasonable collections, but it was not always so. When William Ewart and his colleagues met to consider the problem of public libraries in 1849, they interviewed John Imray, a civil engineer who had seen several parochial and village libraries in the north of Aberdeenshire. The cross‐examination by Ewart began as follows:
Annie S. Swan—forerunner of modern popular fiction
Authors: Gardiner Edmond F.
Published: March 2008

FROM TIME TO TIME librarians in public lending libraries hear their borrowers lamenting that they wish they could find books on the shelves like those written in the ‘Good Old Days’. By this it may be assumed that they are looking for a good story with no violence, no drugs, and no unsavoury bedroom scenes. One author who would have been able to help them in their search was Annie S. Swan. In fact today a Border bookseller has a collection of her books which he lends out to meet the huge demand. Requests come in from Woman's Guilds asking him to talk to them about her life and work.
Public Libraries in Northern Ireland: The New Situation
Authors: Stockham K.A.
Published: March 2008

IN THE UNITED KINGDOM the reorganization of local government has been the subject of public discussion and of central government consideration for the last thirty years. During the lifetime of the recent Conservative Government it became clear that new legislation would be enacted and overdue reforms at last take place. ‘It would be nice to be able to give three cheers for the Government which has carried through this local government reform,’ said K. C. Harrison in his Presidential address at the 1973 Isle of Man Public Libraries Conference, ‘but, looking at the effects of the reshaping on the public library scene, few of us would be disposed to give more than one and a half cheers. What most librarians will never be able to understand is how any Government could possibly countenance four different solutions to the place of public library organization under the reforms—one arrangement for England, another solution for Wales, a third answer for Northern Ireland, and yet a fourth alternative for Scotland.’ The English and Welsh acts came into operation in 1974, Scotland's changes will take place in 1975, but the ‘third answer for Northern Ireland’ has been functioning since October 1973. It is quite different from the other parts of the United Kingdom for, to express it in the simplest terms, public libraries in Northern Ireland are no longer a local government responsibility and the librarians and staffs have become virtually civil servants overnight. The rest of this article is a brief account of how this happened.
The Philosophy of the Kitchen Sink
Authors: Abbott Dorothea M.
Published: March 2008

ELIZABETH MYERS was writing in the war years when the term ‘Kitchen Sink’ had not yet been coined to describe the pre‐occupation of dramatists and novelists with the seamy side of life. Real life then was providing grief and horror enough for most of the population.
J. P. Lamb: the Last of the Patriarchs
Authors: Ollé James G.
Published: March 2008

IN HIS OBITUARY APPRECIATION of R. W. Lynn, for some years city librarian of Southampton, Eric Clough said that Lynn had ‘none of the patriarchal aura that so many of his contemporaries carried’. Some of Mr Clough's readers knew only too well what he meant by ‘patriarchal aura’. One of the hallmarks of a patriarchal chief was that he never let it be forgotten that it was he who was in command. From time to time he might be amiable, sympathetic and even complimentary, but he looked upon the library he ruled as his library and was inclined to regard any dereliction of duty as a personal affront.
Public Library Annual Reports, 1972–73
Authors: Whatley Allan
Published: March 2008

THIS REVIEW of nearly sixty annual reports is the fourth in the series. It marks the end of an era, in that the majority of the reports are from English and Welsh library authorities, and these were the last to be prepared before local government re‐organization came into force in April 1974.
The Average Author
Authors: Val Baker Denys
Published: March 2008

IS THERE such a creature as an average author? Decidedly not, I fancy. Whatever other qualities authors may or may not possess they retain a dogged individuality, with the very sensible exception of their united support for their professional association, the Society of Authors. On the other hand, one hears so much of the extravagant lives of some of the comparatively few bestseller authors—the ones with two Rolls Royces, the motor yacht and the villa in the South of France—that it is sometimes forgotten that there exists a vast body of authors who achieve an average success, just about managing to make a living for themselves and their families by adroit and persistent use of their typewriters.
Whitakers and Book‐Trade Bibliography
Authors: Dewe Michael
Published: March 2008

A FEW YEARS AGO that small but many‐paged volume of facts called Whitaker's Almanack, published annually by J. Whitaker & Sons, celebrated its centenary. In 1974 the firm celebrated the longevity of another of its publications, British Books in Print, first published in 1874 as the Reference Catalogue of Current Literature. While many people know of the Almanack, it is mostly publishers, booksellers, and librarians who are aware of the other publications this firm has produced in the field of book‐trade bibliography in the last 116 years, publications of sufficient scope and quality to delay until quite recently the provision of a British national bibliography.
James Stephens, the Leprechaun Poet
Authors: O'Riordan John
Published: March 2008

WHEN The Crock of Gold was first published in London in 1912, this extraordinary prose‐fantasy, described by a reviewer in The Times as ‘an inspired medley of topsy‐turvydom’, was hailed as a veritable masterpiece from the hands of a new poet of the same school with Yeats and Synge. That poet was, of course, James Stephens, the poet whom Sean O'Casey would later refer to as ‘the jesting poet with a radiant star in's coxcomb’, and to whom he dedicated, in 1949, his favourite play, Cock‐a‐Doodle Dandy. The reviewer in Punch at the time likened The Crock of Gold to ‘a fairy fantasy, elvish, grotesque, realistic, allegorical, humorous, satirical, idealistic, and poetical by turns … and very beautiful’.
The Other Library
Authors: Werkley Caroline E.
Published: March 2008

ALL THE WHILE that the Carnegie Free Public Library brought culture and information and just plain entertainment to the residents of my home town, The Other Library there also provided the inhabitants with information and entertainment. This latter institution was far more powerful, all‐knowing, and, if the truth be told, more popular with its patrons, for all its sometimes shoddiness, than ‘Mister Carnegie's Lib'ary’. It never shut down, not even on holidays or Sundays, and its operations were as busy before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. as the Public Library was during that twelve‐hour stretch of community service. It had no librarian to keep it in order and cost no money at all to maintain, nor did folk have to mind their p's and q's to reap its benefits. The Other Library was Smalltown Gossip.
Charles Lamb: A Kindred Spirit
Authors: Brill Barbara
Published: March 2008

MY MAIDEN NAME was Lamb and this, I think, was the tenuous thread that first drew me towards Charles Lamb when I was in my teens. His letters and essays were compulsory reading at school as a background study to the Romantic poets. My heart warmed to Lamb because of the revelation of his personality in his writings and for the glimpses he gave of his contemporaries, seeming to welcome the reader into the charmed circle of his friends. If I had been restricted to a classroom study of the Tales from Shakespeare, with which his name is first associated in the minds of many readers, I might never have gone on to discover the warmth of his humanity and the sparkle of his humour that glow from his letters and essays. In this year of the 200th anniversary of his birth I hope that many readers will turn back to these writings to renew acquaintance with Charles Lamb as I have done and find the same endearing qualities that won my affection in adolescence.
What ever happened to Book Titles?
Authors: Gunston David
Published: March 2008

IT was Life's Little Pitfalls that started me investigating the art of the book title. When I announced mildly that this was the title of a book I had casually come across and was enjoying, a friend laughed uproariously.
David Herbert: Victorian Editor of Smollett
Authors: Rousseau George S. , Hambridge Roger A.
Published: March 2008

DAVID HERBERT (1830–99), classical tutor, journalist and aficionado of eighteenth‐century literature and history, was born on 15 April 1830 in Glasgow, at the home of his parents on Castle Street. He spent his early life in Glasgow where his father, James Herbert, worked in a shop.
Tolkien's Walk
Authors: Power Norman
Published: March 2008

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO members of a Birmingham family named Warner lived at no. 19 Beaufort Road, Edgbaston. (The firm ‘Currie & Warner’ is still flourishing in Birmingham's old jewellery quarter.) Looking across the road towards no. 6 (‘Inglesant’), Mrs Warner would remark, ‘Joseph's still scribbling!’ Late into the night the oil‐lamp bore witness that, in his front parlour, Joseph Henry Shorthouse was writing John Inglesant.
A Recent Scottish Literary Find
Authors: Cairns David
Published: March 2008

A YEAR OR TWO AGO there came into my hands a manuscript book about Edinburgh in the 1790s written in his old age in 1854 by a certain John Howell. This book, which had been sent by a relative, proved to be of great interest both topographically and as a record of social life, and was eventually secured by the National Library of Scotland. A few months later, the Keeper of Manuscripts in the Library wrote to me again saying that he believed there might be further eighteenth‐and nineteenth‐century letters and papers in the possession of the former owner of the Howell manuscript, and asking whether she might be willing to allow these to be seen, and possibly acquired, by the Library. The papers turned out to be predominantly family papers, and the central figure in this context was John Brown, M.D., the Edinburgh essayist (1810–82), the author of three volumes of essays and papers, Horae Subsecivae, the best known of which are perhaps ‘Pet Marjorie’ and ‘Rab and his Friends’.
A Connecticut Librarian in Great Britain
Authors: Lushington Nolan
Published: March 2008

AT THE OUTSET of this article I should reveal my prejudices. I am an Anglophile. I have visited England several times and enjoy greatly the ambience of British life. This is, I believe, reflected quite clearly in the courtesy, hospitality and respect for individuality that one senses in every British public library. It is also reflected in the very natural use that British people make of their public libraries. The public library is obviously not just a cultural activity, but what the British term an amenity. An amenity is something that enhances everyday individual human life. Book reading is almost universal in England. Books are read on the underground and in railroad trains. In open‐air markets there is always a used‐book stall with throngs of buyers surrounding it.
The Library at Vailima
Authors: Day A.E.
Published: March 2008

TO WRITE that Robert Louis Stevenson in his books and essays draws deeply upon his own experiences to an unusual degree would be commonplace, but it is precisely because of this characteristic that we are able to catch a glimpse of the early beginnings of the library finally established at Vailima on the island of Upolu in the Samoas, where Stevenson's restless wanderings at last came to an end. Almost incredibly, some of his own childhood books, together with many inherited from his father and grandfather, were shipped half way across the world to Samoa. There they were varnished against the tropical humidity to form the nucleus of his library.
Fishing for Fishermen
Authors: Johnson Gordon
Published: March 2008

MOST PEOPLE in the library world at some time in their lives get around to investigating the old family tree, partly out of some hope of finding an interesting hero or villain to brag about, and also as some kind of self‐imposed test of one's professional expertise. I am no exception.
Neglected or Forgotten
Authors: Lochhead Marion
Published: March 2008

WHY ARE THEY neglected or forgotten, those minor (sometimes nearly major) novelists of the first two decades of this century? They have far more than period interest; some of the novels are, in fact, historical, with a theme shaped by historical events. The novelists were all sound craftswomen, scrupulous and professional, having three excellent, even essential talents: that of telling a tale, that of creating character and presenting it in action and dialogue, and that of indicating background. They none of them wrote to order or in a set pattern to be repeated in the next novel.
In the Wake of James Joyce
Authors: O'Riordan John
Published: March 2008

IT WOULD NOT BE beyond the powers of exaggeration to claim that James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. But it would be doubly difficult—difficult, even, for a star‐spangled Dubliner whose lips had been royally touched—to substantiate such a claim within the limits of a single sentence. It is true Joyce wrote a great number of pages, but he did not write a great number of books. He was a great humorist in the true Irish tradition: a savage satirist in the manner of Swift (though subtler in his technique) and a natural parodist and punster. He could perform miracles with words, and just as Wilde was a master of the epigram, so Joyce achieved endless subtleties and successes with the pun.
Bibliothecal Deltiology
Authors: Day A.E.
Published: March 2008

BEFORE MISUNDERSTANDING OCCUR I should explain at once that this essay has nothing whatsoever to do with the latest esoteric theories of library management. It concerns the rather more gentle art, or science, of collecting picture postcards of libraries. An innocuous pastime, you will agree, and one which may be indulged in without fuss or bother or, indeed, any great expenditure of time, energy, or money. It all started when I received cards from two ex‐students, one from Port Elizabeth, the other from New Hampshire. Admittedly the first featured the Mayor's Garden, ‘flanked by old buildings and modern structures,…a quiet refuge in this busy port and industrial city’. But there, large as life and twice as ugly, behind a monument of the old Queen, stands the Public Library, built in that curious mishmash style typical of the last years of Victoria's reign. The second was of the tower of The Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., a 1928 building but in a style strongly reminiscent of a James Gibbs eighteenth‐century church. For someone who has always suffered from an over‐developed magpie instinct it was enough, and this highly specialized branch of deltiology took its place in the long line stretching back through books, old comics, postage stamps, matchbox labels to the very beginnings of car numbers.
SOCIOLOGY, MANAGEMENT AND LIBRARIES
Authors: LEWIS MALCOLM
Published: March 2008

The following paper had something of a rough passage through LR's refereeing procedure. One comment was that the three elements in its title did not cohere. Nevertheless, it was by all accounts well received when delivered as a lecture at CLW. LR prints this article as a basis for ongoing discussion, and is open to constructive comment.
OPERATIONAL RESEARCH LITERATURE FOR LIBRARY/INFORMATION STAFF:
Authors: SEGHRAM JOAN
Published: March 2008

THE TERM operational research was coined, it is said, in 1937. From 1957 it became familiar to British librarians in the planning stages of the National Lending Library, Boston Spa. About ten years ago the work of Graham Mackenzie's Lancaster University research group became widely known. Yet, unlike costing or “O and M”, operational research has not become part of the do‐it‐yourself kit of the young administrator in Britain.
WEIR OF THE NEWS:
Authors: CAMERON KENNETH
Published: March 2008

THE INTER‐RELATIONSHIPS between the flowering of the fourth estate and popular literature, the democratisation of the reading public, and the growth of radicalism in the first half of the nineteenth century have been long recognised. Yet although literary and political historians have dug deeply and frequently in the periodical press of the time for evidence of contemporary attitudes, less attention has been paid to the journalists whose output is represented. It is unsafe to assume that they were typified by literary giants like Dickens (whose editorship of the Daily news was at best undistinguished) or by those who subsequently produced autobiographical accounts. Most were comparatively faceless men, whose social, educational, literary, and political backgrounds can be discovered only through extensive research. Until numerous bio‐bibliographies are compiled on an individual basis, generalisations about the profession as a whole will remain tenuous. William Weir, editor of the Daily news in 1854–58, was one of this powerful new group of substantially‐neglected communicators, but in his case a unique if scattered range of sources permits a reconstruction of the apprenticeship of a Victorian journalist and some interesting insights into the profession.
EVALUATIONS
Authors: BROADFIELD A.
Published: March 2008

The flight from reason: essays on intellectual freedom in the academy, the press and the library. By DAVID K. BERNINGHAUSEN. Chicago: A.L.A., 1975. 175p. Paper‐backed, $7·50.
OUTREACH: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Authors: MOFFITT SHEENA
Published: March 2008

THE MOST problematic aspect of compiling this bibliography was defining the areas of librarianship covered by the term outreach. This leads one to ask whether it should be necessary to draw a line between traditional library service and outreach activities. The answer to this is already becoming apparent. Activities which were previously defined by the terms of “outreach” or “extension” are now accepted as an essential element of the library service. If the public library service is to fulfil the function which its name implies this is a trend which must continue.
LIBRARIES AND THE COMING OF AGE OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Authors: FREUDENTHAL JUAN R.
Published: March 2008

THE VAST PORTIONS of land south of the United States, commonly known as Latin America, form a political, social and cultural structure which—with very few exceptions—owes its singularity to its spiritual ties with Spain and Portugal. Although sharp social and cultural contrasts among the Latin American nations do exist, the Spanish language is a formidable link which has helped to overcome many differences. Latin American literature, despite its very distinctive voices, proclaims in unison a literary wealth which ignores political and geographic boundaries. The development of modern Latin American literature springs from the modernista movement, which roughly spans the period between the late 1880's and the 1930's. The Nicaraguan Rubén Darío (1867–1916) is considered the focal point of this new literary school which led to “the discovery of the emotional life made by the romantic, the almost professional awareness of what literature and its latest fashions are” and “the pride of belonging to an Hispanic American generation which, for the first time, is able to specialize in art”. By the time Latin American literature reached European and North American shores during the late 1920's, a vigorous regionalist novel developed. Its basic themes were played against the background of the Argentinian pampa, the Venezuelan plains, the Andean mountains, the villages of revolutionary Mexico or the jungle of Brazil. In essence, this literature was concerned more with nature than with the social and cultural realities of city life. Writers sought to present exotic materials to the urban dwellers.
SWANSEA: THREE CHIEFS IN FIVE DECADES
Authors: WILLIAMS GARETH
Published: March 2008

THE ABOVE advertisement appeared in The Cambrian of 20th August 1875, and in the two following editions of this weekly newspaper. Swansea had adopted the Public Libraries Acts at a lively and rather stormy meeting in October 1870. Until December 1874, the matter of establishing a library service lay in abeyance. Then after mounting criticism, particularly in the local press, over the long delay in implementation of the Acts, the Town Council appointed a Library Committee which held its initial meeting on 8 January 1875. Their first important duty was to appoint a librarian.
RADICAL CLYDESIDE: THE ANDERSONIAN, 1796–1964
Authors: YIM TSE SHUI
Published: March 2008

Older in its origins than any English Redbrick university, the University of Strathclyde is planning a new library building. A librarian from British Columbia outlines its history up to its present multi‐purpose structure.
SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON WOMEN AND EMPLOYMENT
Authors: MACKIE HELEN M.
Published: March 2008

THIS bibliography is an attempt at bringing together some of the current or most useful writings on women and employment in Britain, to facilitate much needed research and also as a practical aid to those actively involved in campaigning for women's equality in employment. Since it has been necessary to limit the scope of this piece of work, I have excluded material on women's work inside the home and on the situation in other countries. I have also tended to concentrate on current sources of information dealing with the general situation, disregarding the historical dimension and material on one occupation only.
DIRECTORIES OF ONGOING RESEARCH
Authors: ROMAN SAGE H.J.
Published: March 2008

“AUTHORITIES”—the men or women who know more than all save one or two persons in the country, perhaps in the world, about some topic, be it nuclear contamination or the Navajo Indians—are a modern phenomenon. In proliferating sciences and learning in general, they stand out as guides and advisers to us in our ignorance. Like us, they are as ignorant of fields outside their own as they are magisterial in delivering judgment within their speciality.
MACLEOD OF THE REVIEW: AN APPRECIATION
Authors: WEIR MURIEL
Published: March 2008

“With a host of furious fancies, whereof I am commander …” Thus might R. D. Macleod announce himself in the office, charging the atmosphere with vitality. To be middle‐aged was very Heaven. The hardships and struggles of youth were behind him: the terrors and trials and loneliness of old age as yet unknown. But all was not sweetness and light. He had the true Celtic temperament,—up in the heights, down in the depths,—and on other mornings he might come in heavy with depression, and the atmosphere be laden with his ill‐humour. The office was that of a library department of W. & R. Holmes, to whom R. D. was consulting librarian.
GIBRALTAR GARRISON LIBRARY
Authors: GREEN MURIEL M.
Published: March 2008

Containing as it does many of the finest books published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Garrison Library of Gibraltar is no ordinary services' library. Its founding was due to that perceptive Captain (later Colonel) John Drinkwater, author of one of the most famous histories of the Great Siege of Gibraltar which lasted from 1779–1783, the History of the late siege (Spilsbury, 1785). Having suffered from a lack of reading material during the siege, Colonel Drinkwater saw the need for a good circulating library and club as a means of saving the officers of the garrison from “having their minds enervated and vitiated by dissipitation”. His appeal for books, shortly after the seige, attracted nearly 500 gifts which enabled the library to open pending the arrival of the 674 volumes on order from London, there being no bookshop in Gibraltar at that time.
BOOKS FAR NORTH
Authors: HAY DANIEL
Published: March 2008

Recently I remarked that my collection of Caithnessiana is diminishing to the point of invisibility, but no longer had that been said than a copy of David Morrison's The idealist landed on my desk and reopened the whole question of what is happening on the literary scene in the far North. More, in fact than I had suspected. Some of it stems from atomic energy at Dounreay and the growth of Thurso as a dormitory for the Dounreay staff.
MANAGING LIBRARIES: RECENT LITERATURE
Authors: DICKSON A.J. , BURKETT JACK , STANDLEY A.E. , FAIRHURST HARRY , MARTIN W.J. , TURNER NORMAN
Published: March 2008

Organisation und Bibliotheksarbeit. By TIBOR SÜLE and ELLE BRANTHIN. Berlin: Deutscher Bibliotheksverband, 1977. 308p. DM26.50: This work is a collection of contributions from sociological and management points of view. Süle's introduction (pp9–16), which gives a short summary of each paper, attempts an interim account of work within the library field and work as yet unassimilated. The first part of the volume covers sociological aspects, the second management, as seen in Branthin's essay (ppl27–49).