Library Economy Writers: The Contemporary Scene

NEW horizons will open to us through and after the Hitlerite War. As libraries emerged stronger from the 1914–1918 war, so I have faith that they will hold their place, even if at times they have to struggle for it, in the economy of the world to be. That reflection lies behind the sobering thought that I have lived through the really developmental era of British librarianship. The eldest men around my youth were the men who founded the Library Association; and men more immediately my elders, then in early or middle prime—Brown, Burgoyne, Quinn and Jast—were the writers of its text‐books. I was to hear them all, and my own group, lumped into one category as “pre‐war” by the generation which became articulate after 1919; and to‐day by the irony of time this now in its turn has become pre‐war in relation to this other and it may be even greater war.