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Serious contributions to library history are all too rare, and the series of studies now being issued from the University of South Africa Department of Librarianship under the collective title of Mousaion is to be welcomed. It is proposed to publish six numbers of this journal annually in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish. The first number dealt with Les Bibliothèques Ptoléméennes d'Alexandrie, and this is followed by two volumes comprising (in the author's words) a ‘methodological prolegomena to library history’. The term ‘encyclopaedia’ in the title is used in the sense of a technical discipline of historical librarianship. The project is formidable, and it is attacked with meticulous and laborious thoroughness: so laborious indeed that one sometimes has the impression of an elephant cracking a hazel nut. In history, over‐complication is as misleading as over‐simplification, and the scientific historian occasionally seems to introduce his own complexities into a problem for the sheer pleasure of disentangling them. Professor de Vleeschauwer is right in saying that in this field of library history the time for anecdotes has gone (though properly employed the anecdote has its uses). He is equally right in condemning the amateurishness of much that has passed for library history, and the ‘lyricism’ (as he calls it) of works such as Parsons's The Alexandrian Library. But is he right in supposing that the only alternative is to bring into action the whole armament of deductive logic and scientific method, in his anxiety to make his picture philosophically complete, with no term undefined and no particle of it unclassified or unorganized? His guns are too heavy for his target.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century, the US Federal and Supreme Courts heard several cases on the legal status of ships. During this period, Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story determined that a ship was a legal person that was capable to contract and could be punished for wrongdoing. Over the nineteenth century, Marshall and Story also heard appeals on the illegal slave trade and on the status of fugitive slaves crossing state lines, cases that raised questions as to whether enslaved peoples were persons or property. Although Marshall and Story did not discuss the ship and the slave together, in this chapter, the author asks what might be gained in doing so. Specifically, what might a reading of the ship and the slave as juridical figures reveal about the history of legal personhood? The genealogy of positive and negative legal personhood that the author begins to trace here draws inspiration and guidance from scholars writing critically of slavery. In different ways, this literature emphasises the significance of maritime worlds to conceptions of racial terror, freedom, and fugitivity. Building on these insights, the author reads the ship and the slave as central characters in the history of legal personhood, a reading that highlights the interconnections between maritime law and the laws of slavery and foregrounds the changing intensities of Anglo imperial power and racial and colonial violence in shaping the legal person.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, lawyers and judges used history for various purposes. Their works reflected the trends in historical treatments done by historians but was produced for instrumental ends. They drew upon history in their work of making the law and in shaping the profession. Lawyers and judges used history to justify existing law, to bolster calls for change in the law, to provide a defense against critique of the profession, or to provide a shining example for the profession to emulate. This long view of the use of law by the legal profession contextualizes the much-commented phenomena of law office history, which has proved a subject of a contention between the professions of law and history.

It is now forty years since there appeared H. R. Plomer's first volume Dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. This has been followed by additional Bibliographical Society publications covering similarly the years up to 1775. From the short sketches given in this series, indicating changes of imprint and type of work undertaken, scholars working with English books issued before the closing years of the eighteenth century have had great assistance in dating the undated and in determining the colour and calibre of any work before it is consulted.

Looks at Arrow’s early background in New York and his subsequent development in the field of econometrics and mathematical economics. Covers his work in depth and his achievements in the school of thought of economics, adding that the modern school of thought is complementary to the classical school.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).