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Company librarians and information officers are in the communications business. So are industrial publishers. We both try to serve approximately the same audience, but we rarely put our heads together to find ways of achieving our common objectives. If this meeting, therefore, does no more than lay the cables for a communications link which can be used to help us work more closely together from now on, it will have been a great success.

The foundation collection of the printed books now forming the Library of the British Museum was that of Sir Hans Sloane. This comprised about 40,000 volumes. To it was added in 1759 the Royal collection, begun in the time of Henry VII and inherited by George II from his predecessors on the throne.

THERE is no doubt that a lot of literary rubbish is current under the name of children's books; there always was; but it has become rather more apparent in recent times. Mr. McColvin, in a useful article in The Library Review, presents a nostalgic sigh for the days of Henty and Fenn and even of the earlier Ballantyne and upon that builds a somewhat severe criticism of the modern children's library. As so often with writers on this theme, he uses no half‐tones and points a rather dismal scene in primary black and white, and his moral is that it would be better to be without these libraries than that they should supply ill‐written, badly devised and quite useless slush which makes no demands upon the child. If this were a complete picture we should agree. It is not; in the first place, it is based mainly on fiction, a very incomplete view of children's books. But, even considering fiction only, while such writers as Noel Streatfeild, Elizabeth Goudge, Arthur Ransome and David Severn (and a dozen others come to the pen) are supplying us with books, it cannot be wholly true. Then, as one of our correspondents implies elsewhere in these pages, children are of many ages and stages, and it is not wrong to give little ones simple things. It is vain to long for the return of the days when the Pilgrim's Progress, Foxe's Martyrs and the Dore editions of Paradise Lost and the Cary translation of Dante's Inferno adorned, and required dusting weekly, on every parlour table, and to many subsequent readers Ballantyne, except for Coral Island, is as dead as the Pharaohs. We do thank Mr. McColvin, however, for bringing children's librarians to that state of vexed irritation which will induce them to reconsider their work, increase their standards and recall the commonplace that their almost entire purpose is to produce intelligent adult readers. The T.L.S., in an appreciation of Mr. McColvin's article, suggests that the influence of the children's librarian can be even greater in this direction than the teacher's, but, if what he asserts is true, through our libraries many children may be deprived of the intellectual capacity to read anything worth while. Does Mr. McColvin really believe that?

National Library Week was first launched in America in the spring of 1958 with the slogan “Wake Up and Read”. It is now an established, continuing, year‐round programme to help build a reading nation and to spur the use and improvement of libraries of all kinds. The sponsors seek the achievement of these objectives because they are the means of serving social and individual purposes that are immeasurably larger.

NATIONAL Library Week was first launched in America in the spring of 1958 with the slogan “Wake Up and Read”. It is now an established, continuing, year‐round programme to help build a reading nation and to spur the use and improvement of libraries of all kinds. The sponsors seek the achievement of these objectives because they are the means of serving social and individual purposes that are immeasurably larger.

June 20, 1967 Factory — Dangerous machinery (fencing) — “Machinery” — Mobile crane — Part of equipment of factory — Dangerous parts — Obligation to fence — Factories Act, 1961 (9 & 10 Eliz. II, c.34), s. 14 (1).

ALL who have visited Liverpool for any length of time have affection for her. She lies alongside a noble river, watched over by the lofty Liver building and the perhaps more architecturally perfect offices of the Mersey Dock authorities. Even in these days, when the very largest ships have been diverted to Southampton, splendid vessels come from and go to the ends of the earth almost daily. The river is the essential fact about Liverpool; she was born of the river and her waterfront is one of the world's rendezvous. As a city she compares favourably with any English town, and perhaps excels most in her few splendid buildings, amongst which the new and rapidly growing Cathedral takes first rank.

There is greater expectation of hope and progress in library politics than has been known of late years. The letter of the Library Association to local authorities asking them to support its effort to remove the limitation on the library rate has caused much discussion all over the country, and has produced some definite results. We have no access to the replies the Library Association is receiving, but from the information open to us, Hull, Norwich, Sunderland, Taunton, West Hartlepool, Wallasey, Burton‐on‐Trent and several other places have resolved in agreement with the Association.

Liverpool Conference was amongst the largest, as it was amongst the most successful, of recent years. In all but the weather it excelled, and there were fine intervals even in that. We publish the “Letters on our Affairs” by our well known correspondent, Callimachus, so far as it covers the first three days; the conclusion will follow next month, with what futcher comments seem to be necessary. The Annual Business Meeting was a little less rowdy than that at Scarborough, but one thing emerged from it and that was the determination of the A.A.L. to survive independently. There is more in this than meets the eye, and discussion on it may be postponed until a calmer mood prevails on all sides.

March 1, 1966 Factory — Dangerous machinery (fencing) — “Machinery” — Mobile crane — Whether “machinery” — Factories Act, 1961 (9& 10 Eliz. II, c. 34), s. 14(1).