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MY MAIDEN NAME was Lamb and this, I think, was the tenuous thread that first drew me towards Charles Lamb when I was in my teens. His letters and essays were compulsory reading at school as a background study to the Romantic poets. My heart warmed to Lamb because of the revelation of his personality in his writings and for the glimpses he gave of his contemporaries, seeming to welcome the reader into the charmed circle of his friends. If I had been restricted to a classroom study of the Tales from Shakespeare, with which his name is first associated in the minds of many readers, I might never have gone on to discover the warmth of his humanity and the sparkle of his humour that glow from his letters and essays. In this year of the 200th anniversary of his birth I hope that many readers will turn back to these writings to renew acquaintance with Charles Lamb as I have done and find the same endearing qualities that won my affection in adolescence.

IT IS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO on November 12th since Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly at the age of fifty‐five. She had not begun to write seriously until she was nearly forty, but during those fifteen years wrote seven major novels, a biography and many short stories. Her premature death was a deprivation to English literature and innumerable characters with whom her mind teemed were never brought to life to add to the host of friends that readers of her books find in her pages.

MY CHILDHOOD WAS SPENT in an upstairs flat in a London suburb and apart from enjoyable days during the First World War watching my father cultivate his allotment I grew up with little experience of the skills of gardening. It has all had to be learnt by poring over books, picking up hints from gardeners, observing other people's gardens and by experimenting and learning by trial and error. Over the years my gardening bookshelf has become filled with much thumbed volumes that have grown into well‐loved friends. The older I grow the more I realize that gardening can only be learnt by experience, by knowing your soil, the corners of your garden where the sun shines all day or where the damp collects, where there are patches of clay or where the convolvulus and mare's‐tail will appear year after year however rigorously the weeding is done. But every year with the changing seasons I take down the old books and refresh my memory over small details of times of planting, depths, spacing, or proportions for potting composts. In recent years as chemical aids and labour saving devices flood the market I know that I shall not be able to find out about hormone rooting powders, peat pots or insecticides from my books but I can borrow those I need from the local library. I have come to prize my gardening bookshelf more for the memories it brings me of hours spent in our family garden than for the practical content.

IN SAMOA seventy‐five years ago this December, Robert Louis Stevenson died far away from his ‘hills of home’. Samoa has chosen to commemorate this occasion with a special issue of postage stamps, each one carrying a head of Stevenson and scenes from some of his well known books. From Treasure Island, Long John Silver is shown hurrying up the beach with his parrot, Captain Flint, on his shoulder, while the schooner, Hispaniola, is lying at anchor in the background with sails furled, flying the Jolly Roger. From Kidnapped, Alan Breck is seen striding over the moors on a stormy evening with David Balfour in the distance. From Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Mr Hyde is shown walking out into the foggy night while Dr Jekyll drinks the evil potion. From Weir of Hermiston, Archie Weir and Christina Elliott are seen meeting at the Weaver's Stone.

MANCHESTER, like most of our provincial cities, is undergoing a transformation as its grimy Victorian buildings crumble beneath the demolition squads. In their place rise faceless blocks of offices and shops, whose glass and concrete soon lose their early gleam and smoothness and become streaked and shabby. They do not mature with the same charm as the brickwork and the carved and moulded stonework of the buildings they replace, for in spite of its reputation for ugliness and the accepted view of a drab city of umbrella‐carrying citizens and shawl‐clad and clog‐footed millworkers, there was an aura of romance about the older Manchester, something that prompted a man who was not a native of the city, Howard Spring, to write:

FRANK FRASER DARLING, in his compelling Reith lectures ‘Wilderness and Plenty’ that heralded European Conservation Year, warned us of the dangers of pollution and over‐population. He spoke of overcrowding as ‘a depressant of beauty…and of the romantic spirit which is the pearl of our human heritage’. This romantic spirit that is manifested through our poets, writers, artists and musicians, seems to me to have been overlooked in the welter of propaganda that has been poured out, with the emphasis primarily on the scientific aspects of conservation.

TWENTY‐ONE YEARS AGO I was a publisher and a struggling one. After the war two friends and myself had started a new firm. Our first five books had all been slim volumes of poetry, and although we had been lucky with these—they had all covered their costs and received good notices in the press—we had not made a penny profit. The expense of running an office, even a one‐room affair, was eating into our savings, and it was at the moment when our small capital looked dangerously low that Ghandi's autobiography came our way. It seemed a godsend. We all three thought our fortunes were made.

THE MAJOR CONTRIBUTION, though not the only one, has been made by Scottish authors, both by the well‐known ones, such as R. L. Stevenson and J. M. Barrie, in whose work their Scottish origin has played its part, and by others, like Norman Macleod and Ian Maclaren, whose reputation scarcely extended outside their native country or has been since forgotten.

SAILORS ARE GREAT READERS, and every year the Ministry of Defence (R.N.) spends some £30,000 on the purchase of books for the officers and men of the Royal Navy. These are not haphazard collections thrown together from those available. Nearly 30 per cent of the money goes on general fiction, and 25 per cent on adventure stories, detective yarns and thrillers. Nine per cent is spent on science fiction, some 7 per cent each on sea stories, factual and fictional history books, and spy and war stories. Biographies and autobiographies account for 6 per cent, and the rest is made up of humorous stories and Westerns.

ONE GROWS UP, so to speak, with the jargon of the profession: soon there is nothing odd in describing a morning‐and‐evening turn of duty by the phrase, ‘I'm split today’. (‘Horizontally or vertically?’ my family used to inquire.) It needs no highly original thought to deduce that librarians abroad have their shop‐talk too, and no doubt all sensible exchange candidates go primed with the word ‘overdue’ in the language of their choice. It was not so with me. I could count and sing and tell the story of the Three Bears in Norwegian, but I could not, with any hope of being understood, say to a borrower, ‘Sorry, it's out’.