THE ANSWER?—THAT IS THE QUESTION Available to Purchase

R.G. Collingwood, a writer we all looked into in the thirties, said that it was not the answer that was of first significance but the proper framing of the question. (Chekhov had already observed, of art, that in Anna Karenina not a single question is answered, but the problems are perfectly stated.) Such ideas would seem relevant to the work of reference libraries only in so far as they amount to a near‐dismissal of it. They are here advanced as a kind of handle to the suspicion that certain of its recurring difficulties may belong to a fairly labyrinthine area of permanent human responses.