TRAVELLER FROM TUNBRIDGE WELLS: RONALD BENGE REMEMBERS

When his first full‐length book Libraries and cultural change, was published, Ronald Benge stepped forward as the compulsive conscience of our time, a happy worrier about virtually all things in heaven or hell, libraries providing a convenient locus for his professional and personal experience. Three further books written by him have been essentially a continuation of the same anxious questioning about the world in which he and his profession stand. There seems no reason why the tetralogy completed to date, Libraries and cultural change (1970); Communication and identity (1972); Cultural crisis and libraries in the Third World (1980) and the last, here reviewed, Confessions of a lapsed librarian. should not continue further as from his unquiet retirement in Barcelona he surveys the condition of his profession.