METROPOLIS: PEOPLE AND PENCE Available to Purchase

“There is no hope for a more efficient library system for London”, wrote Frank Pacy, City Librarian of Westminster in the mid‐1920s, “under the present divided management by twenty‐eight separate entities”. Root‐and‐branch language of this order, implying that the speaker's professional career has been spent largely contending with the impossible, is not often used by a senior public servant within sight of retirement. Yet Pacy was no radical. Such judgments had in any case been current some twenty years earlier, after experience over half a decade of the then new Metropolitan Boroughs. The delivery of a paper by John McKillop to the Library Association annual meeting of 1906 at Bradford and its subsequent publication in the Library Association record — remarkably, without the author's name, as if representing a corporate viewpoint — provide substantiating documentation.