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Children's Book Week, which occurs during the last week of November, was first inspired by a speech delivered by E.W. Mumford of the Penn Publishing Company at the American Booksellers Association (ABA) annual convention in 1912. Mumford regarded reading as an act of habituation. He said that a child raised on trashy novels will grow up to read such fare, but that a child instilled with a taste for better books will ultimately develop mature and catholic reading interests.

ON April 23rd this year, when all countries in the world will be celebrating the Quater‐centenary of Shakespeare's birthday, the Shakespeare Memorial Library in Birmingham will have attained a majority of one hundred years. Although founded in 1864 the scope of the library was first envisaged by George Dawson, President of the local Shakespeare club in a letter to Aris's Birmingham Gazette of 1861.

THE publishing and distribution of books in the United States has seen many changes in the last decade and seems now to be entering into a period of uncommon activity. During the war the number of new titles decreased, owing to the rising costs of manufacture, and the total number has not yet reached the level of 1914. At the same time the number of volumes being sold from the old and new titles has very rapidly increased and it may safely be judged from the government census figures that the number has doubled since 1919.

LAST week I received a bookseller's catalogue. Working my way slowly and pleasantly to G, I found two names in interesting juxtaposition. The first of these was that of GALSWORTHY. A first edition of In Chancery (“Nice, but upper cover a little spotted”) is offered for 12s 6d: the highest price asked is for a copy of Soames and the Flag—first, limited, de luxe, signed by author, edition, at 16s 6d. Ten years ago when I was, in a small way, buying and selling books, there was a Galsworthy “first” that fetched seventy pounds, if my memory serves me right. There were certainly many at ten to twenty pounds. And what were these books but indifferent modern productions, neither good nor bad to look at, nor for the most part could they be called rare: they had not been long printed, and they had often been issued in impressions of several thousands. Those were crazy days, in which book values were extraordinarily ill‐founded. No doubt Galsworthy's large sales and widespread popularity made it seem as though he were an aspirant to supreme fame to a public less judicious than that of Shaw and other writers whose prices were never so considerable. Stevenson, of course, had brought high prices: he was perhaps the first of the moderns to become largely collected: but for this there was rather more reason. Barrie had realised some ridiculous prices. I remember a bookseller telling me of a Barrie “first” that had been put into a safe on the day on which it was bought, and kept there twenty years, then sold, “in mint state,” for two hundred pounds: surely a record interest on a safe deposit!

Plans for a campaign for books for devastated libraries are getting under way in the United States and Canada. Since the beginning of the war there have been appeals by special groups on behalf of various libraries or the libraries of certain countries. We all know that the best organization and use of material can be achieved only through a joint co‐ordinated effort on behalf of all libraries that have been damaged or destroyed in the war. Launching of such a campaign was deferred for various reasons, but now it seems to be taking its first toddling steps.

This article aims to look into the joint efforts of libraries in the USA and Canada to replace the books that were destroyed or damaged during the war.

A campaign was launched in 1943 that brought together 19 library associations. Regular meetings were held and recommendations were made as to procedures to be followed.

The plans called for the establishment of an American Book Centre, along the same lines as the Inter‐Allied Book Centre in London. The Rockefeller Foundation gave $2,500 to finance the preliminary organization of the campaign.

The article has historical value.

The January 1987 issue of Access, a quarterly update from R.R. Bowker Company, contains a brief article entitled “Ulrich's: A Prime Source in Any Format.” This short piece tells us that 1987 marked the silver anniversary of the founding of Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory and that we have good reason to celebrate. The reason is that Ulrich's, and its sister publications, Irregular Serials and Annuals and Bowker's Serials Database Update, are now available on CD‐ROM and known as Ulrich's Plus. The article states that “this electronic disc format offers high speed access, multiple search points and ease of use.” The article also informs us that data for Ulrich's are continuously revised and updated by no less than thirteen editors who have multilingual skills and whose combined efforts provide indepth profiles of seventy thousand serials and thirty‐five thousand irregulars published worldwide, that there are updates for more than sixty‐five thousand entries, and that there is a “descriptive analysis of the content and point of view of each publication.” And, finally, that all periodicals are subject indexed.

At one time, reference librarians considered a good illustrated reference book to be one in which the plates were bound near the text they illustrated, rather than all together at the back of the volume. Now there is an increasing number of reference books with high quality illustrations on almost every page, including works that have been designed around their graphic content. This article explores technological, intellectual, and economic developments that have contributed to this situation. Using recently published reference works as examples, the article argues that these developments have produced dramatic changes in the relationship between the text and illustrations in reference books, as well as important changes in the relationships between the informational content of reference works and the functions of book authorship and publishing. Criteria currently used for the evaluation of reference books, based as they are on characteristics of verbal or text material and on the assumption of traditional relationships among authors, publishers, and the content of reference volumes, are not sufficient for the selection and use of today's heavily illustrated works. Some suggestions toward the development of more appropriate criteria are made.

The purpose of this paper is to (1) characterize representational and nonrepresentational images; (2) review the literature on representational and nonrepresentational images; (3) introduce the theory of consumption values (TCV) framework vis-à-vis representational and nonrepresentational images; and (4) generate propositions and questions for future research based on that intersection.

Conceptual/literature review with propositions and future research directions.

The authors offer nine propositions and several associated example research questions to explore and document the important ways in which representational and nonrepresentational images can affect the five dimensions of value as outlined in the TCV.

It is the hope that this work serves as a theoretical starting point – surely, there are other theories and frameworks beyond the TCV that may share ties with types of images, which scholars should be encouraged to explore, but if the authors had attempted to document every possible theory, the result would be a limitless document. As such, the authors have honed the efforts on a broad-reaching framework, the TCV, in the attempt to balance theoretical insights with parsimony. Through exploration of these and other avenues, the authors hope that scholars and practitioners alike will benefit from elucidation of theories and effects around representational and nonrepresentational images.

Several practical implications flow from the dimensions and propositions within this work.

Representational and nonrepresentational images have featured prominently throughout visual content and communications for centuries, yet the current body of literature remains scant and underdeveloped in its relationship to marketing. The present work addresses this gap by using the TCV as an overarching framework to generate propositions and future research questions.