The Librarian as Author: Some Poets

Abstract

EVERYBODY seems to write verse at some time or other, because nothing is easier to write than technically correct metrical language. Without the fine poetic power, the art of song is short, not long, and those there be that easily have grasped it in an hour. That is one reason, I suppose, for the fugitive verses that adorn all periodicals and are occasionally collected into little volumes which are the ephemerae amongst books, issued with many vain hopes. Lancashire folk know that Samuel Laycock, whose collected writings appeared in 1900, was a true bard. His “Bonny Brid,” one of the Lancashire Lyrics, written during the cotton famine, 1861–65, is more than an echo of social history; it is a song which Burns would not have despised. And Laycock served for six years as librarian and hall‐keeper to the Stalybridge Mechanics' Institute, where he acted as host to the various clubs meeting there, making tea for them amongst other activities. That is by the way. It is a far cry to William Robert Credland, who was deputy librarian at Manchester when I began. He wrote, in his later years, an irregular sonnet on Edward Edwards which cannot now be found. I remember, however, that to a meeting of the L.A. Publications Committee in 1912 the late Herbert Jones read it in his mellifluous and sonorous voice, and only the opening remains thus in my mind—

Citation

BERWICK SAYERS, W.C. (1938), "The Librarian as Author: Some Poets", Library Review, Vol. 6 No. 6, pp. 260-264. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb012042