Search results

Fasteners, adhesives and sealants are as important to aerospace production as the most sophisticated advances in engine design. Without the correct nuts and bolts, no aircraft can function, or certainly not for long, efficiently and safely. Even the man in the street — as well as his wife and children — was made dramatically aware of this after the Amsterdam air crash last year when numerous daily newspapers clearly explained the function of sheer pins and showed, in large, simplified drawings, how they are used to attach the engines to the wings of the Boeing 747. But even though the proverbial “Man on the Clapham Omnibus” and his schoolboy son know the importance of fasteners in aircraft manufacture and maintenance, the industry itself does not appear to hold them in the same high esteem. Fasteners, it seems, are like discreet waiters in a decent restaurant: you don't notice them until they're missing. In order to compile this feature, we wrote to all known manufacturers and suppliers of fasteners, adhesives and sealants seeking information on products and their applications. Despite the opportunity for publicity, the response was negligible. The subsequent telephoning of non‐respondents (which was most of them) was only marginally more productive. The interesting thing was the air of indifference shown. Many of the companies bluntly said they were not interested — not even in free publicity. One firm even said that it did not need publicity, it never had and it never would. Such self‐sufficiency, though admirable, is hardly indicative of a dynamic, developing company and typified an attitude of many companies in this sector which seemed to spring from a general lack of interest — or pride, perhaps — in what they are doing. At the suggestion of our editor, I contacted the Society of British Aerospace Companies (SBAC) to obtain figures on the quantities and the value of fasteners produced and sold by their member companies. Here, at least, I thought, would be the basis of an article. But here I was wrong. The SBAC does not compile such figures. It is clear from all this that suppliers to the aerospace industry do not take fasteners as seriously as “The Man on the Clapham Omnibus” does. It is equally clear that the companies mentioned on this and the following pages consider fasteners, adhesives and sealants to be very important.

LET'S VARY LITERACEE with a little bibliographic burglaree. If you suddenly feel like humming The Pirates of Penzance or recollecting Gilbert and Sullivan, you are closely attuned to the bibliographic thoughts in my mind. Literary allusions are the rich overtones that make reading and writing a grand collaboration and a happy pursuit. An author may conscientiously write to convey ideas, but if a cut above the average, he always strives as did H. L. Mencken to express his ideas ‘in suave and ingratiating terms, and to discharge them with a flourish, and maybe with a phrase of pretty song’. His creative efforts will be mostly wasted, however, if his readers lack the requisite literary background and sophistication that would enable them to join in his game and share his earnest effusions. Literacy is never enough; a young child can read and understand the six one‐syllable words ‘who steals my purse, steals trash’, but that same child can grow to be a mighty old man without ever fully comprehending the sentence unless he reads Othello and studies Iago's presumptuous remarks on ‘Good name in man and woman’.

When William Faulkner sent off his manuscript of Sanctuary in 1929 to the publisher Cape and Smith, Harrison Smith responded, “Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.” From its very inception, Sanctuary, Faulkner's shocking novel of a young co‐ed initiated through rape and murder into the criminal world of hoodlums, was controversial. When Smith sent Faulkner the galleys, the author decided to revise the manuscript. This revised version of Sanctuary, published in 1931, went on to become his most scandalous and, not coincidentally, his best selling work. While The Sound and the Fury and Light in August languished and went out of print, the horrific tale of Temple Drake and the gangster/thug, Popeye, generated sustained sales as well as a flurry of popular interest in the young writer from Mississippi.

Intergenerational relations imply dealing with ambivalences. This thesis is what the contributions to this volume have in common. Yet, critics may claim that it is not a new insight. Among them are those who recall that some of the greatest sagas in Greek mythology depicted what we now refer to as ambivalence. Others may argue that the experience of ambivalence pervades everyday life. Adult children, for example, feel ambivalent about placing their elderly father or mother in a nursing home. Parents have mixed feelings about their child’s living with a partner without an intention to marry and have children. A son’s or a daughter’s “coming out” as gay or lesbian is fraught with ambivalence on both sides.

THE serious and intractable housing problem persists to plague governments and embitter citizens. Why this is so can be gleaned from a few statistics.

BY a happy consonance the Year Book of the Library Association for 1946 reached us as the Conference at Blackpool was beginning. It set a character to the Conference in that it contained a most admirably faithful portrait of the President. He was, without a shadow of doubt, the personality of the week. The flexible and earnest open features of the portrait are those of an unusual man, distinctive in thought, speech and act. This was reflected in an address which someone declared, with the warm acquiesence of his hearers, to be “a classic of librarianship.” Even if this prove to be an exaggeration, since prophecy is unwise and rarely fulfilled, that was the effect he produced, in words that began on a self‐excusing note and with a, to himself, unfair comparison of himself with his predecessors, became with increasing tempo a pæan of the joy so many of us share in librarianship, in spite of the sacrifices and slights that all librarians encounter, interwoven with the quoted or suggested results of a life‐time of reading.