Library Review

MALCOLM BULLOCH, JOHN

1933 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb011970

MR. Frederick Niven's recent references in these pages to the Canterbury Poets anthology of ballades and rondeaus suddenly reminded me that a rondeau of my own was printed in the little book. Although the year 1887, when the book, which is now rather difficult to pick up, appeared, is a long way off, I do not in the least feel like Methuselah. What, however, does lend a sense of the passing years is the change in literary taste, and the humptydumptying by one generation of critics of the heroes of an older group. We have had a good opportunity of witnessing the process on a wholesale scale in the belittling of the Victorians, and Henley himself is a peculiarly ironic example of the process, for, having bludgeoned many literary reputations, his own has slumped, for the collected edition of his work which appeared a few years ago left the younger school of critics cold, while the influence of his rather truculent young men on the Scots Observer has faded.

BELL, J.J.

1933 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb011971

AMONG my mental photographs that despite the years remain distinct, even vivid, is one of a cheque for Ten Pounds, signed by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head. It represented the agreed payment for a collection of verses embodied in a picturebook for young people, the artist being Charles Robinson, and it was my first honorarium with the dignity of double figures.

HILTON SMITH, R.D.

1933 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb011972

IN his Books their place in a democracy, which ought in course of time to become a kind of bible to all those concerned with the production and distribution of books and which should give any young librarian a clearer conception of his job than a dozen formal textbooks, Charles L. Duffus usefully defines public libraries under two heads the first, a mechanism for buying and circulating books the second, a means of bringing individuals into touch with the good things which good books contain. Today, when a variety of causes has brought about a demand upon library resources which is at once the delight and despair of administrators, libraries are in the paradoxical condition that the more success they achieve as mechanisms for masscirculation, the less chance have they of performing their real task of getting the right book to the right reader. The proper relationship between these two functions of a library has been turned topsyturvy by overwhelming public pressure, and organizations whose main duty it is to establish a contact between live book and inevitable reader are in danger of becoming institutions for the mere dissemination of bundles of paper and print.