bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Commandos of the Margins
Authors: KATIN LOUIS
Published: March 2008

For some years I have been collecting the writings of that type of reviewer who, despite his pugnacity, insists on being anonymous. He is the gentleman (I use the courtesy title against my better judgment) whom we all know so devastatingly well—the scribbler on the margins of library books. The hobby of collecting such scribblings (should I call it philos‐graffitism?) has the supreme advantage of costing nothing. But it garners a rich if suppurating harvest of what one might call “literary sidelights”.
Children's Service in Public Libraries: a report from the U.S.A.
Authors: PAULIN LORNA V.
Published: March 2008

Why does the provision for children in public libraries often fall so far short of what it could and should be? Why does it vary in adequacy from one town to the next even more than the adult service does—and that is saying a great deal? Why is there a perennial shortage of children's librarians?
Samaru gets a Public Library
Authors: PLUMBE WILFRED J.
Published: March 2008

The white buildings of Ahmadu Bello University lie between the A.19 Zaria‐Funtua road and a small river that runs, deeply trenched in red laterite, through the surrounding scrubland. For much of the year this “river” is a spruit of water no more than a foot wide and two inches deep—it is only in electric storms that it hisses as a torrent between the laterite banks—nevertheless, it may be taken as a pledge, at all times of the year, that sufficient subterranean water may be pumped out of the sands of the river‐bed to meet the needs of the University. The large blocks of buildings, in modern concrete idiom, look as if they have been torn from a city and dropped upon this open scrubland.
A Child's World: Part II
Authors: BAUER HARRY C.
Published: March 2008

American children practice certain commendable but anomalous self restraints that are hard to account for. They seem to comprehend that beer, wine, and ardent spirits are for adults, while soda‐pops are for young people. So long as they may participate in all festivities, that is all that matters. Mother and father drink coffee, but the children clamour for milk. The reason for the abstention could possibly be that soda‐pops and milk taste sweeter than caffeine and alcohol. One further example is worthy of note. Little boys and girls like to watch their papas light up a pipe or smoke a cigar. The children may like to play with matches and pretend to smoke, but they seem to understand that smoking is not for children. Aside from these exceptions, little children assume their natural role only when they find that to be more profitable than to play “the man.”
Topographical Literature
Authors: GREGORY L.F.
Published: March 2008

Has any other nation a record comparable to Britain's in what is loosely — and not very happily — called topographical literature? It is very doubtful. A good catalogue of second‐hand books may contain some 3,000 titles under British Topography — books to do with places, the spirit of places and the men and women who breathed life into them (excepting the solitary regions): some written by men of genius and many by authors of talent. The prices of the items may range from a few hundred pounds to several shillings.
The Librarian in Industry
Authors: WYNN JONES A.
Published: March 2008

When I am asked what my job is and I reply that I am a Research Librarian, I can tell by the blank look on the inquirer's face that he or she is none the wiser!
Charting Local History
Authors: STEPHEN PETER
Published: March 2008

For many years librarians have regarded the collection and preservation of local material as part of their responsibility to their communities. Most public libraries boast a local collection, from the odd shelf or two in the librarian's office to ambitious and elaborate departments. The small collections should not be despised, for the preservation of local material is of itself an important practice, but merely to preserve this material where there exists neither the will nor the means to exploit it, is a meaningless exercise. Those librarians who have amassed considerable and commendable local collections seek also to attract an enthusiastic clientele, usually successfully, because of the very nature of the subject and the curiosity towards its own history which is inbred in a community.
THE CHALLENGE OF HALF OUR FUTURE
Authors: Harrod L.M.
Published: March 2008

‘An education which is practical, realistic and vocational must send boys and girls out into the world literate and able to perform simple calculations with confidence and accuracy.’ So says Half Our Future, the Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) which was asked by the Minister to advise him on the education of pupils aged 13 to 16 of average and less than average ability. The pupils who were the subject of this Report constitute approximately half those in secondary schools; those who will become eventually half the citizens of this country, half the workers, half the fathers and mothers.
WHAT DID THE CLASSIC AUTHORS LOOK LIKE?
Authors: Gunston David
Published: March 2008

CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS, like all well‐publicized figures of the present day, are well enough known to the world. Thanks to the advertising of publishers, the ubiquity of television, cinema newsreels, newspaper gossip writers, personal appearances to sign copies of new books and, above all, the perfection of modern photography, there can be few writers to‐day who are not known to their public as faces. Yet, on the whole, present‐day authors' faces are a mundane lot. Few literary figures can now be called spectacular to look at. There are a few lank, long‐haired, ethereal figures, one or two striking beards, and a handful of faintly exotic types, but in the main, present‐day authors (and authoresses, for that matter) are a dull crowd, indistinguishable in a thousand people picked at random. They are stodgy, rather bored in countenance, sucking overdone pipes, or peering owlishly from behind commonplace horn‐rimmed spectacles. All the spectacular figures have gone. Bernard Shaw was the last reminder of the spacious days when a literary man appeared his part. We no longer have the gigantic majesty of G. K. Chesterton, the aristocratic demeanour of A. E. W. Mason, or the cadaverous, bearded mask of D. H. Lawrence, while the bewhiskered dignity of Trollope and Dickens now seems but a myth.
THE SUSSEX LIBRARY SCENE
Authors: Dove Jack
Published: March 2008

AWAY FROM THE MURKINESS of industrialization and yet near enough to the Metropolis to get there in sixty minutes or less! Such is the position of the person who is fortunate enough to dwell in the south of England's green and pleasant land. No fogs; few belching chimneys —although the nationalized industries have disfigured the landscape not a little; hardly any snow; no heavy industry; sleek, crisp‐moving electric trains; rolling downs and crystal sea.
CHEKHOV'S POWERS AS A SHORT STORY WRITER
Authors: Green Muriel M.
Published: March 2008

CHEKHOV'S SHORT STORIES reveal, above all, his observation and love of mankind. He depicts people as they are—good, bad, or a mixture of qualities and defects—never judging them or moralizing; he even seems to love them all equally and is, indeed, a kind of Russian Chaucer in the way he stands aside and observes. Cruelty is the only sin he condemns.
TRACKING THE RAILWAYS
Authors: Ottley George
Published: March 2008

THE FUNCTION OF THE REFERENCE LIBRARIAN is to conduct requests for knowledge to known or to possible sources. He can sometimes do this by turning with arm‐length familiarity to a bay full of familiar friends —B.N.B., Besterman, Walford, Britannica, Willings ‐ and an increasing number and variety of bibliographical aids to specialized fields in current literature, but a request for wide, intensive and retrospective book coverage of a subject can set him dancing for a whole afternoon.
THE CLASSLESS STATE
Authors: Hutton M.
Published: March 2008

THE CLASSLESS STATE, considered by many to be socially ideal, is only achieved in the world of books by fiction. Rivalling the marketing boards in zeal, librarians passionately mark down eggs to the fifth place after the decimal (641.665 13) and, deaf to the entreaties of geographers, callously separate Mother Earth from her children. Why, then, should the most individualistic form of writing enjoy a sequestered Stellen‐bosch? Is P. G. Wodehouse neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring that he must be denied a number—a privilege accorded him even in the concentration camp? Must Harriet Beecher Stowe rub shoulders with Gertrude Stein and James Janeway doss down with Jerome K. Jerome? It is hard luck for squares, who have moved in such different circles, to have to toe the party line, when, being immortal, they might reasonably expect to be given the freedom of the Heavenly City.
SCOTTISH COLLECTIONS IN CANADIAN LIBRARIES
Authors: Fyfe Janet
Published: March 2008

SINCE every second Canadian one meets, be his name Taraschenko or Bobarovich, claims at least one Scottish ancestor, it might be expected that there would be some notable collections of Scottish literature or history to be found in Canadian libraries. These collections are, however, in fact relatively few in number, as I discovered when engaged recently in editing, on behalf of the Research Libraries Section of the Canadian Library Association, a Directory of Special Collections in Canadian Libraries. Only five librarians of the several hundred who kindly replied to my detailed and no doubt troublesome questionnaire mentioned in their replies any significant amount of specifically Scottish material.
GETTING TO KNOW ELIZABETH GASKELL
Authors: Brill Barbara
Published: March 2008

IT IS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO on November 12th since Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly at the age of fifty‐five. She had not begun to write seriously until she was nearly forty, but during those fifteen years wrote seven major novels, a biography and many short stories. Her premature death was a deprivation to English literature and innumerable characters with whom her mind teemed were never brought to life to add to the host of friends that readers of her books find in her pages.
THE SCOTTISH CONTRIBUTION TO CHILDREN'S LITERATURE
Authors: Douglas Alison
Published: March 2008

THE MAJOR CONTRIBUTION, though not the only one, has been made by Scottish authors, both by the well‐known ones, such as R. L. Stevenson and J. M. Barrie, in whose work their Scottish origin has played its part, and by others, like Norman Macleod and Ian Maclaren, whose reputation scarcely extended outside their native country or has been since forgotten.
THE SCOTTISH CONTRIBUTION TO CHILDREN'S LITERATURE:
Authors: Douglas Alison
Published: March 2008

The characteristics of the so‐called Kailyard school of Scottish novelists are similar to what may be found in Catherine Sinclair, Norman Macleod and the short stories of Mrs Cupples: close observation of persons and traditions in a well‐known, confined locality, a good deal of humour and a good deal of pathos, sometimes deteriorating into sentimentality. None of the most typical Kailyard books was meant for children, but the three principal authors—S. R. Crockett, Ian Maclaren and J. M. Barrie—all wrote at least one juvenile book of some merit.
WHICH? SOME THOUGHTS ON STOCK CONTROL
Authors: Feiweles L.J.
Published: March 2008

This paper does not claim to be original. Many sources and opinions have been used. The aim is to stimulate thought and discussion. Stock editing cannot be divorced from stock provision (and indeed stock exploitation) and is in a sense synonymous with it. The result is the briefest survey of provision for adults.
THE BERMONDSEY BOOKSHOP
Authors: Haymon Sylvia
Published: March 2008

FEBRUARY OF THIS YEAR sees the forty‐fifth anniversary of the founding of the Bermondsey Bookshop, that quixotic venture whose extraordinary blend of the sophisticated and the naive, the complacent and the committed, epitomized in its nine‐year history a good many of the prevailing literary and social attitudes of the Twenties.
THE MAN BEHIND DON QUIXOTE
Authors: Lamont Brown Raymond
Published: March 2008

WHILE MIGUEL DE CERNANTES SAAVEDRA languished as a guest of King Philip of Spain in a small noisome cell of the Madrid prison, he had time to do two things. He wrote each day at a rickety table with the quill and parchment he had bribed his jailer to supply. His manuscript concerned an old gentleman farmer, grey, lean, and weatherbeaten—like Cervantes himself, then fifty‐six—who had read so many books about chivalry that ‘his brain had dried up and he had gone completely out of his mind’. The old man was obsessed that he must leave his farm and ride out as the knights of old had done into a world of giants, maidens in distress and deep enchantment. Nearly four hundred years later the name of the old knight‐errant is still world famous, for Cervantes chose with care the name of his run‐down hero, Don Quixote. (Cervantes spelt it Quijote.)
LIBRARY BY MOONLIGHT
Authors: Stewart Brown Jean
Published: March 2008

THE CARETAKER shook her wild grey curls and stuck the candle end in the whisky bottle. That was all the light the library could afford, she said. But when I said They must have afforded the whisky, she gave me a very odd look.
LEGACY OF CHILDHOOD
Authors: Agelasto Charlotte P.
Published: March 2008

MANY OF US who enjoyed some years of childhood before our world blew up in August 1914 had the inestimable advantage of being born into a family where books and reading were of paramount importance. Learning to read myself at an early age, because for one thing I was finding the books read aloud to younger members of the family too childish, but also because I as the eldest was encouraged to take on the task of reading aloud, throughout my life I have never escaped the ‘fascination of the printed page’.
LETS TALK ABOUT BOOKS
Authors: Brown Mary G.
Published: March 2008

I ALL READERS TALK ABOUT BOOKS but how many stop to consider how books talk about them? The choice of a book is a very personal matter and inevitably tells something of the mind, the interests and the character of the reader. This applies not so much to books selected from a public library where readers are encouraged to be adventurous in their reading and to try a wide variety of books, but it does apply to those books which we buy and keep as our chosen friends and companions.
THE SCOTTISH RENAISSANCE MOVEMENT AFTER FORTY YEARS
Authors: MacDiarmid Hugh
Published: March 2008

SYDNEY GOODSIR SMITH had a long and fully documented essay, ‘Trahison des Clercs or the Anti‐Scottish Lobby in Scottish Letters’, in Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. II, No. 2, October 1964, in the course of which he wrote:
STIMULI AND SANCTIONS
Authors: Ready William
Published: March 2008

THE PARLOUR OF ROTA'S OLD BOOKSHOP, Bodley House, in Vigo Street just around the corner from the more commodious present location in Saville Row, London, is where Knox first began to wend its way towards us here in Connecticut. I was sitting there taking something against the cold, buying books for our new institution—this was in the summer of ‘63—when the Knox collection first came up and, as usual, only because I was there at the right and lucky time.’ Leg work is the only way to acquire collections. Bookstores, booksellers are to be visited, not left out in the cold of catalogues. The Rotas, father and son, Bertram and Antony, are the agents who had brought the great Tolkien collection to Marquette University, and almost the Joyce Cary manuscripts, but that's another story. There are libraries all through this North America that have been enriched by a Rota and now it was the turn of Sacred Heart.
CONSUMER ADVICE IN THE LIBRARY
Authors: Wainwright Gordon
Published: March 2008

IT IS PERHAPS NOT TOO MUCH OF AN EXAGGERATION to say that most people now use a library as a source of information rather than as a source of entertainment or of cultural enlightenment. Other media have largely taken over the entertainment function and there was never more than a small number of readers who were interested in what we might loosely term cultural enlightenment. There is evidence to suggest that this new primary function of libraries as sources of information is already well established and that the influence of media such as television will make it even more pronounced in the future. (Increases in borrowings have, in the last ten years, been more noticeable in informative and ‘practical’ books than in other kinds.)
BAUDELAIRE'S CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE HORROR AND ECSTASY OF EXISTENCE
Authors: Green Muriel M.
Published: March 2008

TO UNDERSTAND AND APPRECIATE the writings of Charles Baudelaire it is necessary to know something of his character, life and outlook, for they throw light on the beliefs he expresses in his works. It is interesting, though probably useless, to speculate whether the sensitive, mother‐fixated boy of six would have developed differently, if his father had not died, and if his idolized young mother had not remarried, and thus aroused violent jealousy and hatred in the child. Baudelaire's nostalgia for his comfortable and elegant home is expressed in an early poem in Les Fleurs du Mal
DYCHE'S DICTIONARY
Authors: Cecil Hampshire A.
Published: March 2008

IT WAS ON THE ‘SIXPENNY’ SHELF outside the bookseller's window, its handsome leather binding a reproach to the inferior boards of this tasteless age. The flyleaf proclaimed it to be the sixteenth edition of A New General English Dictionary, Peculiarly Calculated for the use and improvement of such as are unacquainted with the Learned Languages, published in 1777. Not only that, but A Compendious English Grammar with general rules for the ready formation of one Part of Speech from another; by the due Application thereof such as understand English only may be able to write as correctly and elegantly as those who have been some years conversant in the Latin, Greek and other Languages. Also A Supplement of the Proper Names of the most noted Kingdoms, Provinces, Cities, Towns, Rivers, &c., throughout the Known World. And finally, to give good measure for the published price of six shillings, a list Of the most celebrated Emperors, Kings, Queens, Priests, Poets, Philosophers, Generals, etc., whether Jewish, Pagan, Mahometan or Christian.
Fun among the phonies
Authors: Jackson C.M.
Published: March 2008

IT AMUSES AN OLD CODGER LIKE ME to see youngsters spend three weeks visiting three towns in the whole of mighty Russia, and come back with everything neatly parcelled and tied up. At that age I was equally bumptious, of course, but the older I get the less cocksure I am of anything. As dear old B. used to say (Shaw not Russell): ‘It takes eighty years to acquire wisdom—and then it's too late to apply it.’ Pity; because at sixty‐five I feel I'm just beginning to cut my wisdom teeth; and nobody particularly wants me.
Persons from Porlock
Authors: Campion Sarah
Published: March 2008

YOU REMEMBER THE ORIGINAL ?—that He, She or It who interrupted Coleridge when he had written down no more than forty‐four lines of Kubla Khan—that unidentified Person who came from Porlock to cheat us of a masterpiece.
Ici on Parle…
Authors: Hutton M.
Published: March 2008

IF THERE ARE STILL LIBRARIANS in the Outer Hebrides or the far‐flung bastions of Greater Brummagen who cannot quite get the hang of cataloguing and faceted classification—or any other, for that matter—they may be grateful for the equivalent of a phrase‐book, so that they can carry on intelligent conversation if they happened to be marooned with a member of the Classification or Cataloguing Research Groups, or even Dr Ranganathan himself, at a conference lunch or on a slightly delayed British Railway train.
A Victorian Best‐Seller
Authors: Bowhay Dorothy
Published: March 2008

WHEN LOUISE DE LA RAMEÉ was a young girl, a child she knew could not pronounce Louise so called her ‘Ouida’; so that the prolific Victorian novelist whose books became a craze at the circulating libraries of the time obtained her pen name through a child's mistake. In 1967 it will be a hundred years since what was perhaps her most famous novel, Under Two Flags, was first published.
Burritt makes a note
Authors: Dunning Alfred
Published: March 2008

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, while his country was in the throes of civil war, a wealthy American, Elihu Burritt, was walking through Scotland notebook in hand. He was in the final stages of a walk from London to John o' Groats, and his role was that of corresponding secretary (unpaid) to a farmers’ club he had founded in his native town of New London, Connecticut.
The Birds of Academe
Authors: Sherman John , Nugent Robert S.
Published: March 2008

NEARLY TWO DECADES OF LABOUR in what used to be called ‘the groves of academe’ affords one a familiarity with the denizens of those misty woodlands. One remembers well the groves of yesteryear. Perhaps, because of the general twentieth‐century lack of conservation, time has not passed lightly over the stretches of hoary deciduous and coniferous perennials in this historic arboretum.
A Common Market of Ideas
Authors: Fussell G.E.
Published: March 2008

FAR BE IT FROM ME to lay any claim to originality. All I can hope to do is to say in my own words what has often enough been said before. Can anyone do more? It is common form to admit that in the fairy tale time of long ago knowledge was shared throughout the known world. It was not hedged in by security and electric fencing. The common market of ideas was not even affected by the continuous wars. It flourished despite the soldiers.
Author Bibliographies
Authors: Day A.E.
Published: March 2008

MORE AND MORE LIBRARIANS will now have to consider subjects for either a thesis or a bibliography to be submitted to the Library Association for a fellowship. These notes are intended to encourage those who might have some interest in contemporary English literature to compile a bibliography of a twentieth‐century author.
Books for the Boys
Authors: Finch Robert
Published: March 2008

‘OH, AND PERHAPS YOU'LL KEEP AN EYE on the House Library. They'll read all sorts of rubbish if you're not careful.’ I gathered that this was thought to be one of my lesser duties as the new House Tutor, and not to be compared with my responsibility as ‘Keeper of the Pocket Money’ or ‘Scrutineer of the Games Book.’
Another Look at Eppie Elrick
Authors: Kidd James
Published: March 2008

EPPIE ELRICK, William P. Milne's Aberdeenshire tale of the '15, first appeared in serial form in the Buchan Observer, running from 19 October 1954 to 6 September 1955. It was then published by Scrogie of Peterhead, as a book of 284 pages, before the end of the year. Another impression was issued in the following year.
The IFLA Conference, 1967
Authors: Harrod L.M.
Published: March 2008

ATTENDANCE at only two or three days of IFLA's five‐day conference held at Toronto in August is enough to convince one of the great—and potentially much greater—value of this organization to the improvement of libraries throughout the world.
A Question of Language
Authors: Burgess Moira
Published: March 2008

ONE GROWS UP, so to speak, with the jargon of the profession: soon there is nothing odd in describing a morning‐and‐evening turn of duty by the phrase, ‘I'm split today’. (‘Horizontally or vertically?’ my family used to inquire.) It needs no highly original thought to deduce that librarians abroad have their shop‐talk too, and no doubt all sensible exchange candidates go primed with the word ‘overdue’ in the language of their choice. It was not so with me. I could count and sing and tell the story of the Three Bears in Norwegian, but I could not, with any hope of being understood, say to a borrower, ‘Sorry, it's out’.
Gardening Bookshelf
Authors: Brill Barbara
Published: March 2008

MY CHILDHOOD WAS SPENT in an upstairs flat in a London suburb and apart from enjoyable days during the First World War watching my father cultivate his allotment I grew up with little experience of the skills of gardening. It has all had to be learnt by poring over books, picking up hints from gardeners, observing other people's gardens and by experimenting and learning by trial and error. Over the years my gardening bookshelf has become filled with much thumbed volumes that have grown into well‐loved friends. The older I grow the more I realize that gardening can only be learnt by experience, by knowing your soil, the corners of your garden where the sun shines all day or where the damp collects, where there are patches of clay or where the convolvulus and mare's‐tail will appear year after year however rigorously the weeding is done. But every year with the changing seasons I take down the old books and refresh my memory over small details of times of planting, depths, spacing, or proportions for potting composts. In recent years as chemical aids and labour saving devices flood the market I know that I shall not be able to find out about hormone rooting powders, peat pots or insecticides from my books but I can borrow those I need from the local library. I have come to prize my gardening bookshelf more for the memories it brings me of hours spent in our family garden than for the practical content.
Leonard Merrick and Alfred the Great
Authors: Wilson P.J.
Published: March 2008

AN INTERESTING CHOICE for re‐issue this autumn in Anthony Blond's Doughty Library of novels by Victorian and Edwardian authors is Leonard Merrick's The Position of Peggy Harper: interesting because Peggy Harper has always been deservedly a favourite of Leonard Merrick's admirers, and these have been many and various; interesting because this novel is highly typical of Merrick's fiction in the realistic vein; and interesting, too, because any revival of enthusiasm for Merrick, a writer who has never quite had his due, should remind us of the great debt that Leonard Merrick owed to another man who, when he died in 1942, had been for a year borough librarian at Stratford on Avon, and whose name might be remembered today in several connexions more often than it is. The librarian was Alfred Wareing and it was he who was responsible for the publication between 1918 and 1921 of a uniform edition of Merrick's works.
Pidgin English He No Die
Authors: Yarham E.R.
Published: March 2008

NUMEROUS ATTEMPTS have been made to establish a universal language. In fact, over two hundred schemes have been drawn up, but none of these artificial syntheses is in sight of becoming a world tongue; and the chances of this ever happening are extremely remote.
The Value of Library History
Authors: Cutcliffe M.R.
Published: March 2008

THE HISTORY OF LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP has been given both too little and too much attention. That there is a great deal of indifference on the part of many librarians concerning their past, or their original raison d'être, is obvious from the style of many of the articles written in defence of such a knowledge. The greater part of such articles seems to be taken up with explaining that apathy concerning library history is very understandable because modern methods in librarianship are more important; that what happened thousands of years ago in Egypt, or even in Britain in the last century, has very little bearing on modern theory or practice; that modern developments in library science—computers and the like—render the older methods utterly useless. For example, Reichmann says:
How Books Get Written
Authors: Gunston David
Published: March 2008

THE WAY WRITERS WORK has always interested readers of their books. There is no doubt that in the various foibles of literary men there is something reflective of their approach to their craft.
‘Little Puddlecombe’
Authors: Jefferson G.
Published: March 2008

HISTORY, so it is said, is told in the lives of the great; but the lives of the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’, if but only dimly recorded, are evocative of the ordinary, the circumstantial, and give somehow a more real picture of a period.
Ille Terrarum …
Authors: McManners Margaret
Published: March 2008

I EDMUND BOGG must have been one of the most untiring of dales' walkers to judge from the titles of his books: Two Thousand Miles in Wharfedale, From Eden Vale to the Plain of York: a Thousand Miles in the Valleys of the Nidd and Yore, Richmondshire and the Vale of Mowbray, The Old Kingdom of Elmete, and The Border Country.
The Heroic Theme
Authors: Ready William
Published: March 2008

MAN IS HARD TO HANDLE; often he rejects, let alone Gandalf, his God. For as long as man lives all nature and beyond are trying to relate to him, but there is something in Man, both divine and diabolic, that rejects this. When his dark side embraces nature it is to subdue it and harness it to his will. When his good side woos nature it is to excape his manhood and be subject within it. The body's chemistry, land, sea, sun and sky are all directed this way or that. What is eternal in the mind contains this record, but overlords it with a vain and brave attempt, encompassing catastrophe, to break free of his past, to relate or not relate as the will moves, not to share in love, but to control or to cower. Man leaps from ice floe to ice floe, from hummock to tussock, to avoid what the baying may bring forth, what will come from surrender of his will that causes so much woe, and yet without which he would not be.
Confessions of a Library Biographer
Authors: Munford W.A.
Published: March 2008

I HAVE NEVER HAD ANY KIND OF AMBITION to become a sort of biographer general to the library profession. But then, as in other parts of my experience, delightfully unexpected things have happened, praise be! Penny Rate has been the only one of my books which has sold even tolerably well: I even fear that there may be something in the assertion made by one member of my staff when, soon after the formation of the Library Association's Library History Group, she said to me: ‘Whether you like it or not, I am afraid that you will go down in library history as the author of Penny Rate.’ Yet I never intended to write the wretched book at all; I only did it because the L. A. asked me to find someone else to do it for the municipal library centenary of 1950.
Book Expenditure in British Public Libraries 1966–7
Authors: Clough E.A.
Published: March 2008

AT THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES CONFERENCE at Dublin in 1967 my paper entitled ‘What should we provide?’ included an appraisal of where we stood in the matter of book expenditure, and this appraisal was based on the Public Library Statistics 1965–66 issued by the Institute of Municipal Treasurers and Accountants and the Society of County Treasurers. As is generally known, these statistics are compiled with the help of the Library Association and are recognized as the official statistics for public libraries by the Department of Education and Science. What is apparently not so widely known is that these statistics are published after the lapse of about a year from the end of the period they cover. This seems to me to be perfectly understandable but it did result in a good deal of criticism that the figures I had used in Dublin were out of date.
The Library Association Annual Conference 1968
Authors: Correspondent a
Published: March 2008

THE CONFERENCE OF THE British Library Association held in the Guildhall, London, in May attracted almost seven hundred delegates. Three were from Scotland and four from Northern Ireland.
The University Library: Functions and Opportunities
Authors: Line Maurice B.
Published: March 2008

COMPUTERS are, in principle, the same as any other technical invention when it comes to practical applications. They either serve the purpose or they do not. We use typewriters rather than pens because they are faster, provide a better and more legible copy, allow additional copies to be made without extra labour, are more economical in paper, and so on. There are some purposes for which none of these factors is valid, and for these purposes we still write rather than type.
The Therapeutic Value of Strong Language
Authors: Jackson C.M.
Published: March 2008

MY TITLE IMPLIES THAT STRONG language has a therapeutic value. I am not suggesting that foul language for its own sake, or foul language used out of habit, should be condoned, but I do assert that—in given circumstances—the use of swear‐words can relieve tension and frequently prevent physical violence.
A Prompt Copy of Etherege's
Authors: Conaghan John
Published: March 2008

THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND has three copies of the first quarto (dated 1676) of Sir George Etherege's The Man of Mode, one of the finest and most successful of Restoration comedies. One of these is a prompt copy, a good specimen, prepared with professional skill and thoroughness. It deserves notice for the information which it provides about Restoration stage practice, and for the connexion which it may have with a somewhat obscure episode in the history of the King's Company.
Books as Things
Authors: Campion Sarah
Published: March 2008

A MUSICAL FRIEND once reassured me, when I apologized for talking while a Hadyn symphony was pouring from the radio. ‘Rubbish!’ he said. ‘Haydn and Mozart and all the rest wrote background music—conversation music—that people could chatter to.’
Books printed at Sheffield before 1760
Authors: Gilberthorpe Enid C.
Published: March 2008

THE FIRST BOOK known to have been printed at Sheffield did not appear until 1736. Not even the most fervent upholder of local pride and tradition could claim that this is particularly early. There was, of course, no printing at Sheffield resembling that which occurred at certain provincial towns before 1557, when the Charter granted to the Stationers' Company practically put an end to printing in England outside London, Oxford and Cambridge.
Current Trends in Children's Literature
Authors: Osborne Enid M.
Published: March 2008

OVER SEVENTY children's librarians, teachers, publishers, writers and illustrators attended the first course organized by the School of Librarianship as part of the Loughborough College of Education annual summer school. The course was truly international in scope and much of the credit for its success must go to the way in which our visitors from the continent entered so enthusiastically into discussions, answered questions, delivered formal lectures which were both informative and entertaining, all in what was for them a foreign tongue. Their modest apologies for any gaps in their knowledge of the English language proved entirely unnecessary and put the native English‐speaking members of the audience to shame when they considered how badly they would have fared in a similar situation.
The Corelli Story
Authors: Bowhay Dorothy
Published: March 2008

THERE IS A PLAN afoot by a well‐known publishing firm to re‐issue all Marie Corelli's novels as paperbacks. Some are already out, and the plan will, it is hoped, help to kindle in a new generation of readers the interest awakened when they were first published in as remarkable an output of fiction as ever issued from a woman's pen.
Indications of Alfred Cotgreave
Authors: Crawford John
Published: March 2008

ALFRED COTGREAVE was born at Ecclestone in Cheshire in 1849 and acquired experience first at the Royal Exchange Library in Manchester and then with Birmingham public libraries. In 1877 he received his first appointment as librarian at Wednesbury on the northern fringe of Birmingham. Wednesbury at that time was a small town of 25,000, engaged principally in the production of iron and steel; the economic crash of 1872 had dealt its economy severe blows from which it was only now beginning to recover. On 21 March 1878 the library opened for its first day's business with a stock of 4,446 volumes classified by the Birmingham scheme and an Elliot indicator, the type which had been in use in nearby Wolverhampton since 1870.
Pride and Prejudice
Authors: Hay Daniel
Published: March 2008

IT WAS ONLY A SHORT TIME AGO, when an interview with the local press brought out the fact that the joint bibliothécariat of my predecessor and myself spanned a period of almost eighty years, that I began to feel really old, and to look back to the time of my entry into the library profession as a part‐time assistant, while I was still at school.
The Craft of Writing
Authors: Russell Ivy
Published: March 2008

WE ARE NEVER too old to learn. This should be the motto of every writer, for when the mind of a man or woman is closed to suggestion or criticism, his days as an author are numbered.
Am I a Scotchman?
Authors: Thomson Tom
Published: March 2008

HOW MANY OF US—prickly Scots—have been offended to hear ourselves described as Scotch? Scotch, we inform our imagined denigrators, is an adjective reserved for the description of the products of Scotland—we are Scots. Yet how correct are we in this description? Indeed, some of the classic writers of Scotland would certainly never have hesitated to call themselves Scotch or Scotchmen.
G. & S.: The Copyright Aspect
Authors: Anderson Kenneth
Published: March 2008

THE SAVOY OPERAS of Gilbert and Sullivan represent one of the most fruitful and interesting partnerships in musical history. This marriage of two complementary minds, the masculinity of Gilbert and the softer, more feminine personality and talent of Sullivan, produced a series of works which are just as popular today as when they were written over seventy years ago. Neither man was really successful without the other; even their collaboration lacked a clear artistic purpose because both deprecated it as running counter to what they conceived to be their true function as writer or musician. On Sullivan's part, in particular, one senses the root cause whereby one work followed another in a long series; namely, the need to support a chosen mode of living within the orbit of high society. Moreover, these operas have had no real successors and the extent to which they have been appreciated and performed in non‐English speaking countries has been negligible. Yet most of them, written and produced with the normal intent of topical entertainment, have survived for three‐quarters of a century, seemingly unaffected by outdated allusions in the text and a basic churchiness in much of the music. Their continuous popularity in Great Britain and the United States has not only been reflected in capacity audiences all through the years, but also in the establishment of Gilbert and Sullivan societies and a steady flow of books about the lives of the two men and their joint works. This very element of success is the underlying reason why copyright protection, or indeed the lack of it, is such an important factor in the history of the Savoy operas, not only during the lifetimes of Gilbert and Sullivan, but also in our own day. It has affected both performances and the printed music of these works very considerably, amounting to a special study in itself, well worthy of examination.
The Kaleidoscopic Mind of Peter Mark Roget
Authors: Bauer Harry C.
Published: March 2008

PETER MARK ROGET died on 12 September 1869, Nevertheless, he is more widely known today than he ever was in his heyday. His name has endured a full century, and may indeed endure for ever, primarily because of the great popularity, extraordinary sale, and unforgettable title of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. This astonishing collection of interchangeable parts of speech, ‘classified and arranged … so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition’, was first published in 1852, long after Roget had retired from medical practice and shortly after he had given up his post as secretary of the Royal Society. He was already 73 years old, but since he could not slacken his habitual pace, he continued to work unceasingly on revision after revision until there were twenty‐eight revisions when he died seventeen years later. After his death, his son, John Lewis Roget, edited the Thesaurus until 1908; a grandson, Samuel Romilly Roget, then took over the editorship and retained control over the legacy until 1936.
Scholarly Reprints
Authors: Mackerness E.D.
Published: March 2008

ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTS in publishing since the Second World War has been the growth, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the ‘scholarly reprint’ business. To readers who cannot afford to buy expensive books this may seem by now to have become something of a luxury trade, the high prices asked—two, three and four pounds a volume—suggesting excessive profits. But in the context of such things as university expansion and the establishment of specialist libraries in need of standard works not normally available in the well‐known cheap editions, reprints of books which enjoy an acknowledged reputation in the world of learning have suddenly assumed a new importance. The demand for certain classes of books is so great that secondhand booksellers cannot meet it: and even if they could, they are under certain disadvantages when their wares are contrasted with freshly reprinted material coming straight from a modern publishing house.
R.S.V.P. or Receiving Some Valuable Publicity
Authors: Stockham K.A.
Published: March 2008

IT IS WITH EXTREME CAUTION that one dares to assert that something unique, original or even unusual has been achieved, but I do not know of any other British public library that has initiated three publication parties for local authors in the last two years. This has been achieved by Nottinghamshire County Library and this article is an acccount of these efforts in book promotion. Unfortunately, librarians are not often thought of as promoters of books, mainly because they have always been more concerned with their collection, preservation and lending.
Mahatma Gandhi's Spiritual Classic:
Authors: Braybrooke Neville
Published: March 2008

TWENTY‐ONE YEARS AGO I was a publisher and a struggling one. After the war two friends and myself had started a new firm. Our first five books had all been slim volumes of poetry, and although we had been lucky with these—they had all covered their costs and received good notices in the press—we had not made a penny profit. The expense of running an office, even a one‐room affair, was eating into our savings, and it was at the moment when our small capital looked dangerously low that Ghandi's autobiography came our way. It seemed a godsend. We all three thought our fortunes were made.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Authors: Stockham K.A.
Published: March 2008

THAT THIS YEAR sees the fiftieth anniversary of the Public Libraries Act of 1919 and the consequent birth of county libraries in England and Wales is a fact that has not gone unnoticed. At the Southport Public Libraries Conference the County Libraries Group of the Library Association invited Miss L. V. Paulin to deliver a paper entitled ‘County Libraries: Half a Century's Achievement’ and also arranged a jubilee dinner at which the principal guest and speaker was Miss A. S. Cooke, who was county librarian of Gloucestershire when the Act was passed. The Library World for May marked this event by the inclusion of a symposium of five relevant articles and in the Journal of Librarianship for July F. A. Keyse has written an excellent account of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust experiments of 1915 to 1919, which were to shape the administrative pattern of British county libraries.
Sean O'Casey:
Authors: O'Riordan John
Published: March 2008

THE NINETIENTH ANNIVERSARY of Sean O'Casey's birth and the recent acquisition by the New York Public Library of the papers of his literary estate afford an opportunity to view, once more, the remarkable achievements of a dramatist of universal distinction. A passionate believer in the cause of man's dignity and freedom, whose plays touched off riots and sparked off controversies, whose works wrung the beauty and passion and heartaches from the experiences of everyday life and ‘whose lips were royally touched’—to quote J. C. Trewin's recent colourful phrase—O'Casey was, with Shaw, one of the few incomparably great playwrights of the present century. Not without his detractors: one critic's jibe that O'Casey is ‘an extremely overrated writer with two or three competent Naturalist plays to his credit, followed by a lot of ideological bloat and embarrassing bombast’ is the kind of factitious reaction one expects from critically immature minds. Shaw's plays, at first, were slighted, but they survived, and today are flourishing; predictably, O'Casey's will enjoy a similar fate. O'Casey is a world dramatist in the widest sense, because he viewed the theatre in the same epic way as Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans.
Old John and I
Authors: Hay Daniel
Published: March 2008

‘DID YOU KNOW old John Simpson?’ I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked this question about my predecessor over the past thirty‐six years. Inevitably my interlocutor follows up his question with the statement, ‘He was a terror; you either took what he gave you out of a selection of two or three books, or did without’.
Allan Ramsay and The Gentle Shepherd
Authors: Law Alexander
Published: March 2008

ALLAN RAMSAY'S The Gentle Shepherd is one of these dramas that few people nowadays have read or seen. True, the production in The Royal High School during two of the earlier Edinburgh Festivals drew the attention of many to this old favourite, and the charm of Ramsay's words and songs produced in the classic setting of the old High School hall is such a pleasant memory that a revival at some future Festival would be welcome.
Children's Libraries in Scandinavia:
Authors: Jones Heather , Medlock Lynne
Published: March 2008

WHEN ASKED which aspect of the library service was given priority in Copenhagen a senior librarian said he was reluctant to emphasize any one aspect of the service but when pressed felt that priority had to be given to children's library services.
The Importance of Dragons to Lady Librarians
Authors: Werkley Caroline E.
Published: March 2008

DRAGONS represent times far away and marvellous, where none of the ordinary work‐a‐day worries can torment mankind. In Dragon‐Land there are turreted castles, feasts of nightingale tongues, and pomegranates served in golden bowls. Here all men are the bravest of knights, victorious in battle and love, and all women are beautiful and gentle, and wait for lovers in hidden gardens of roses and lime trees, the while they weave tapestries of unicorns and wyverns.
A New Newspaper Library
Authors: Whatmore Geoffrey
Published: March 2008

FOR MANY YEARS the editorial library has been something of a Cinderella of the profession. A little aside from the main stream of library development, preferring press cutting to books as sources, most of them nevertheless provide an efficient current information service with economy, scarcely changed in their essentials for fifty years. All the more interesting then that computer developments may one day place the newspaper library in the forefront of automated library systems.
Charles Murray: Author of “Hamewith”
Authors: Kidd James
Published: March 2008

THE POPULARITY of Hamewith and its author was quite phenomenal in the north‐east of Scotland. It is a significant mark of the affection in which the author was held by the community at large that he was soon popularly known as ‘Hamewith’ himself, in the same way as a farmer in that airt comes to be known by the name of his place. Hamewith was first published by Wyllie & Son, Aberdeen, in 1900. By 1909 a new and more elaborate edition was called for, with an introductiion by Andrew Lang, then Scotland's leading littérateur, and published by Constable in London. By 1912, when he was entertained to an official public dinner in Aberdeen, Charles Murray, who had emigrated to South Africa in 1888 at the age of 24, was then Secretary for Public Works in the Union of South Africa. It is important to note that Murray spent practically the whole of his working life (1888–1924) in South Africa, and wrote practically all his verse in exile. He is by no means the only Scottish writer to have seen his native land more clearly from a distance. One thinks, for example, of Stevenson in Samoa, Grassic Gibbon in Welwyn Garden City, and George Douglas Brown in London.