Comment

IT OCCURRED to me the other day that I have been using public libraries since 1920, beginning my association with them on a false declaration of age. I had not reached the minimum age for membership then locally prescribed and it seemed to me absurd that I should be excluded from the shelves of G A Henty in the children's corner of the lending library on a mere technicality. I confess, too, that my early type of ethical practice developed further when it became necessary, on each library‐visit, to delay my departure until there was on exit‐counter duty an assistant who would not notice that he was charging out to me two Hentys at a time, one, legitimately, on my fiction ticket and the other (shame, oh shame!) on the non fiction only. The librarian‐in‐charge of the department was a purist and had to be outflanked. Seven years later, after I had joined his staff, he and I had many a tussle over matters which doubtless seemed important to us both. Incidentally, it seems curious now that my acceptance of a junior post in a public library should have been so firmly disapproved of by friends and relations. There seemed, to them, to be no future in it. It seems even more curious, in view of my life‐long obsession with books that I should, myself, have regarded the post as no more than the stop‐gap which would make it unnecessary for me to return to school after the summer holidays; I had had enough of school discipline. My earliest aspirations in further education, leisure‐time, were motivated much more by business and commercial than by librarianship ambitions. A hard core perhaps remains: I was not displeased when a publisher friend told me recently that I could think like a business man! Well, Angel pavement period notwithstanding, I did not turn away from business ambitions until Frank Seymour Smith had joined the staff as our new deputy librarian. Only when I had had time to watch him in action did I decide to become a librarian like him. I doubt if most new entrants to the public library service join now against a background of so much doubt and disapproval. But then public libraries have come a long way since 1927.