The Library World Volume 59 Issue 3/4

Abstract

EVERY presidential address to the Library Association has had its own quality, just as our Presidents have each brought their own personal contribution to Association history. Some will recall from Dr. Bronowski's quite charming address the small foreign child, the possessor of only a few words of English, who, asking the Librarian of Whitechapel, a tall, thin, moustached man, for some book that would help him to fuller English, was given Midshipman Easy. It was “the perfect choice”, he was able to say some forty years after. That is characteristic of the President's method ; a generous recounting of his experiences in his own cultural development, with many all‐too‐brief side reflections on the relations of science to the humanities, the ultimate indispensability of reading in education and therefore of libraries as its providers. An assessment of Panizzi as our greatest and of Conrad as a novelist comes in, both like himself men born to another language and yet of extraordinary attainment in the adopted tongue which they had to learn in adult life. A repeated tribute to public libraries, to which he himself owed much and a plea that they should be careful to provide books which would enable not only the scientist to qualify in more general cultural reading but would enable the layman to know the language of science which to so many is indeed foreign. He instanced “the concept of relativity, the concept of quantum junips, the principle of uncertainty, the statistical principle,—ways of thinking which rank among the imaginative achievements of the human mind. But because they are evolved in science, they are formulated in language which few people understand”. His main plea, the one that the press chose to record, was for a standard edition of the classics of science, such as Newton's Opticks, Darwin's Origin of Species, the essays of William Kingdom Clifford, and of Charles Pearce, which can speak the language of science to this generation, as can the later ones of Sherrington, Eddington and Schrodinger, and for the availability of these in all public libraries as, indeed, in others. Librarians, he thought, could do much to bring about such an edition and its distribution.

Citation

(1957), "The Library World Volume 59 Issue 3/4", New Library World, Vol. 59 No. 3/4, pp. 41-60. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009416