THE PAPER SHORTAGE Available to Purchase

READERS will not fail to be struck by the attenuated size of this issue; though they will, we hope, be equally quick to notice that the cutting down has been done at the expense of the advertisement rather than the editorial pages. The reason is, of course, acute shortage of paper resulting from fresh and drastic restrictions that have recently been put into force. These necessitate something serious being done, and after much anxious consideration of various alternatives—including that of omitting one issue and publishing a combined April/May issue—we decided that we should best be carrying out what we conceive to be our duty to our readers by maintaining continuity of our editorial contents at the expense of advertisement matter; since without the former there would be no “vehicle” for the latter. We hope to return to more normal conditions in May—though the number of advertisement pages will from now on be considerably fewer than hitherto. We are afraid that it will also be necessary in future to use a much thinner and inferior quality of paper; which will inevitably mean that the standard of the reproduction of photographs will be less satisfactory, so that they will be less informative technically than hitherto.