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WHY, oh why do we for ever associate romance with moonlit nights, snow‐capped mountains, southern seas, and the sun‐baked alleys of the Far East? Why, when everywhere and every day it is to be found close at hand, whether we live in the solitude of the country or the clangour of the town? The very air is charged with it; the elfin figures of romance dance and weave their intricacies before us, if we have but eyes to see.

The Editor of Library Review has invited me to write an article on my literary beginnings. It is a task at one and the same time happy and—well, if not sad it does make one aware of how “the sunrise blooms and withers on the hill.” I might best begin with the return of my people from South America to Glasgow (beloved by them) where, I recall, I was long homesick for the land of my birth. Charles Darwin, visiting my native country, Chile, was impressed chiefly by its sunshine, the visibility there, the keen clarity of its atmosphere. Though in time I learned to love Glasgow it seemed, in comparison, smoky.

IN his Books: their place in a democracy, which ought in course of time to become a kind of bible to all those concerned with the production and distribution of books and which should give any young librarian a clearer conception of his job than a dozen formal textbooks, Charles L. Duffus usefully defines public libraries under two heads: the first, a mechanism for buying and circulating books; the second, a means of bringing individuals into touch with the good things which good books contain. To‐day, when a variety of causes has brought about a demand upon library resources which is at once the delight and despair of administrators, libraries are in the paradoxical condition that the more success they achieve as mechanisms for mass‐circulation, the less chance have they of performing their real task of getting the “right book to the right reader.” The proper relationship between these two functions of a library has been turned topsy‐turvy by overwhelming public pressure, and organizations whose main duty it is to establish a contact between live book and inevitable reader are in danger of becoming institutions for the mere dissemination of bundles of paper and print.

THE regions we are to invade are not necessarily those of everyday routine administration. Of one thing I feel certain: that when we venture together in the quest I shall always be conscious of one unspoken question in your minds: the question that has damned more schemes at their inception than any other. It is this: “Where is the money to come from?”

WHERE is that tiresome tram? I'm late already, and yet I've been kept waiting for five minutes for the cursed conveyance. The crowd gathers, so there'll be a rush for it when it does come; and it will play with us that game so poignantly exhibited in Noel Coward's This Year of Grace, and pull up fifteen yards beyond the post. Ah! here it comes…

With this number the Library Review enters on its ninth year, and we send greetings to readers at home and abroad. Though the magazine was started just about the time when the depression struck the world, its success was immediate, and we are glad to say that its circulation has increased steadily every year. This is an eminently satisfactory claim to be able to make considering the times through which we have passed.