Library Review

DOUIE, C.O.G.

1952 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012176

Twentyfive years have passed since the publication of the Kenyon Report on public libraries, and it is time to put on record the story of the Committee which drafted the report, for soon it will be too late.

NOWELL, CHARLES

1952 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012177

For a man to have spent forty years and more in public library work suggests to the Editor that there must be some reminiscences which ought to be made available to succeeding generations. My way has been of little moment compared with some whose unwritten autobiographies must be full of pioneer efforts, abounding enthusiasms, desperate disappointments and great achievements. Edward Edwards left lots of letters and memoranda, and muchtoo much perhapsin print. Yet we know so little of the man that we do not even possess a photograph. There are librarians still living who knew men of great ability, round the turn of the century, about whom we should like to know more to restrict myself to public librarians, for example James Duff Brown, whom I never met Frank Pacy, whose kindness to me personally on all occasions is a happy memory Stanley Jast, another to whom I owe much, who was not only a great librarian, but whose nurseryCroydonwas the best known British library service for many years, and his progressive ideas there were put into practice elsewhere by the dozens of librarians whom he trained. There are librarians still living who knew these men in their prime and I still hope that Savage and Sayers, for example, will record their memories before it is too late.

ESDAILE, ARUNDELL

1952 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/eb012178

The fly on the wheel said, Lord, what a dust do I raise As Secretary of the B.M. I was the fly on the wheel, and conscious that the dust was none of my raising. Dust there was in plenty. A place of such nationaland internationalstanding is constantly straining not only its own resources but also those of its friends to make vital and correspondingly costly acquisitions. Such was the purchase, with the generous help of John Pierpont Morgan, junior, who would have liked them for the Morgan Library, of the Bedford Hours and the Luttrell Psalter the latter being one of the chief sources of our knowledge of English farm life in the Middle Ages. But during my fourteen years in the Office the Museum was faced with four great opportunities, quite out of the ordinary and in all four it was successful.