In My Good Books

I commenced what, but for a sense of humour, I should call my career at a small, isolated library in the provinces. We were a specialist library. We specialised in non‐specialist material. This may seem mere playing with words. But it is not. The establishment, like myself, was the inheritor of a tradition that libraries were meant for books, not trade journal files, abstracts (whatever abstracts might be), schedules, reports, theses, plans, specifications, blue‐prints, bibliographies, bibliographies of bibliography—all that fried string which (see recent conference papers passim) some malapert knaves are now strenuously wishing upon us.