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CALL IT what you will, serendipity, accident, fortuitous chance, but add it to coincidence and together they will take some beating. This was brought home to me recently when browsing through fifty year old files of The Nation and The Athenaeum. In a vague search for something entirely different my eye was attracted by the heading, ‘The woman librarian’, a somewhat inelegant title to a longish letter to the editor sent by Dr Ernest A Baker on the occasion of a discussion at University College London conducted by Miss Marian Frost. Librarian at Worthing, who was at that time one of the sixteen women chief librarians in the country. And then, the very next day, there appeared in the November issue of NLW a note about the potential qualities of women librarians first published in 1889.