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In an earlier paper Daniel Hay has described the Wick Library in which his professional career began. In the following short piece, here published posthumously, he considers a number of the readers whose needs and tastes he had reason to study. How far the records maintained in most libraries could today furnish such retrospective data may be doubted.

Our symposium published in the Winter number has raised much interest among readers at home and in Canada and the United States. Now we have pleasure in publishing comments by James Brindle, County Librarian of Fife; Daniel Hay, Librarian, Public Library, Whitehaven; J. G. O'Leary, Borough Librarian, Dagenham; and Paul Sykes, City Librarian, Peterborough. There is also a contribution from an ex‐teacher reader who has used libraries much in his own career.

Basically I doubt whether the Wick Public Library, which I first knew as a child, and later as an assistant, has altered much externally, unless it has been extended in some way at the back. It was a handsome building, standing on a road junction; one wing containing the newsroom with museum above lay along Sinclair Terrace, the other at right angles to it lay down Cliff Road which led to Bridge Street. This wing had a large room on the ground floor originally designed as an amusements room, but as I remember it used as a stock room for the Caithness County Library when it was formed. Above it was a room planned as a ladies' magazine room, but used in the 1930s as a work room.

THE LOOMING MASS OF BLACK COMBE, and the sky‐line of the central fells that he can see from his window—Scafell, Scafell Pike, Great End, Harter Fell, Bowfell, Crinkle Crags, Coniston Old Man—are among the great shaping influences in the work of Norman Nicholson. The fells, the rocks that make the fells, the becks and the rivers that flow down the fells all speak to him and through him. The other great influence on his writing is his religious belief. As he himself said recently in a radio broadcast: ‘The universe is not just a huge mechanical coffee‐grinder, ticking over and over without aim or purpose. It works to a pattern; it works to a plan. And part of the sheer enjoyment of being among mountains comes from our sometimes feeling swept up in the plan, where every end is a new beginning and every death a new birth.’

IT WAS ONLY A SHORT TIME AGO, when an interview with the local press brought out the fact that the joint bibliothécariat of my predecessor and myself spanned a period of almost eighty years, that I began to feel really old, and to look back to the time of my entry into the library profession as a part‐time assistant, while I was still at school.

Recently I remarked that my collection of Caithnessiana is diminishing to the point of invisibility, but no longer had that been said than a copy of David Morrison's The idealist landed on my desk and reopened the whole question of what is happening on the literary scene in the far North. More, in fact than I had suspected. Some of it stems from atomic energy at Dounreay and the growth of Thurso as a dormitory for the Dounreay staff.

I was fairly certain that I had explored most aspects of Whitehaven history. However this town of endless surprises had yet one more to spring on me. On his return my plumber friend unwrapped a parcel: it contained a ship's log — not the official one, but one kept by an apprentice on a voyage to the far east in the early nineteenth century — and the minute book of the Whitehaven Literary Society, 1820–1822. Of all the material things written about White‐haven very little has been said about its cultural activities. For the development of an interest in art it should be said by the way that the town owes a debt to William Gilpin of Scaleby Castle, the agent for Sir John Lowther of Whitehaven. Directly through his patronage of Matthias Read, and indirectly through his son and grandsons Gilpin contributed not a little to the promotion of painting in Cumberland and elsewhere.

‘I KNEW Sandy was really ill, at that time’, she said; ‘he had gone back to reading Walter Scott. He always does when he is very poorly.’

THE WHITEHAVEN PUBLIC LIBRARY, in common with most municipal public libraries, has built up over the years a fairly comprehensive collection of books and pamphlets on the history of the community and surrounding area which answer most local queries, but in addition there are notebooks and letter files that form a sort of department of dead ends, queries that have petered out. Families die out and their personal papers are destroyed, or they move away and take their records with them; accidents happen to church records so that there is a gap of greater or lesser magnitude just at the point at which one is interested. There are dozens of ways in which one can come up against a stone wall, and find further progress impossible. Then some time later, sometimes years later, a clue or the answer will turn up.

THE ART OR PRINTING was first introduced into Cumberland in 1735 when Thomas Cotton came to Whitehaven at the invitation of Sir James Lowther. Whitehaven was at that time an expanding town with a growing trade with Ireland and the colonies of Maryland and Virginia.