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CALL IT what you will, serendipity, accident, fortuitous chance, but add it to coincidence and together they will take some beating. This was brought home to me recently when browsing through fifty year old files of The Nation and The Athenaeum. In a vague search for something entirely different my eye was attracted by the heading, ‘The woman librarian’, a somewhat inelegant title to a longish letter to the editor sent by Dr Ernest A Baker on the occasion of a discussion at University College London conducted by Miss Marian Frost. Librarian at Worthing, who was at that time one of the sixteen women chief librarians in the country. And then, the very next day, there appeared in the November issue of NLW a note about the potential qualities of women librarians first published in 1889.

IT WAS in the mid‐1970s when, having been in the habit for a year or so previously of commenting on public library authorities' annual reports in a partially analytical manner, I observed a decline in the arrival of the same in my post. A decline which has been maintained, I may add, and which has led me to the conclusion that, while it is OK on the sender's part if I remark how splendid has his service been, he would nevertheless be happier if the ammunition was withheld for me to observe that his annual loans cost x‐pence more each than those of such‐and‐such an authority!

THE Library Association record was, for many years, an important part of our professional lives. Its articles made it the do‐it‐yourself magazine of librarianship that the majority of us, grinding our way part‐time towards qualification, used, cherished, filed or cut and pasted into our study‐notes. The correspondence columns and the various announcements formed a necessary link between members at a time when there were few other points of contact.

I RECALL a seminar on the problems of teaching history where one speaker began by saying that until he was asked to prepare a paper, he had been cheerfully unaware any problems existed.

IN AMERICA the book world is bemoaning the fact that us internal postal rates were hiked up yet again in July for the special ‘library rate’ and the ‘fourth‐class book rate’—the former to 10 cents for a 2‐lb package, and the latter to 28 cents for the same. They might be interested to know that the cost of sending a 2‐lb parcel of books by post internally in the UK is now the equivalent of $1.00.

IF YOU WERE to ask why ‘the treatment’ for (the London Borough of) Sutton's new central library, there are two reason's. First, Sutton's Chief, Roy Smith, was on like a flash to my sloppy discourtesy in neither acknowledging his invitation to the official opening in December nor turning up for it, and gave half a day of his time last month instead to take me round; second, in Mr Smith's own words, ‘This is one of the most interesting new libraries to come out of public librarianship for a long time’, and I am disposed to agree with him.