TY - JOUR AB - 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. VL - 48 IS - 11 SN - 0307-4803 DO - 10.1108/eb009294 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009294 PY - 1946 Y1 - 1946/01/01 TI - The Library World Volume 48 Issue 11 T2 - New Library World PB - MCB UP Ltd SP - 169 EP - 184 Y2 - 2024/04/23 ER -