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FOR MOST of us, public library history usually amounts to scarcely more than rapidly dimming recollections of a handful of acts and commissions; dry facts memorised during library school lectures and retained just long enough to put the exams behind us. Of course, we remember the great names— Carnegie, Dewey, McColvin, and perhaps a few others—but apart from retiring old‐timers' regular assurances that it was all so much better and worse back then, we tend to know little of the day‐to‐day routines of our predecessors.