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The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the role of the body in information in serious leisure by reviewing existing work in information behaviour that theorises the role of the body, and by drawing selectively on literature from beyond information studies to extend our understanding.

After finding a lack of attention to the body in most influential works on information behaviour, the paper identifies a number of important authors who do offer theorisations. It then explores what can be learnt by examining studies of embodied information in the hobbies of running, music and the liberal arts, published outside the discipline.

Auto-ethnographic studies influenced by phenomenology show that embodied information is central to the hobby of running, both through the diverse sensory information the runner uses and through the dissemination of information by the body as a sign. Studies of music drawing on the theory of embodied cognition, similarly suggest that it is a key part of amateur music information behaviour. Even when considering the liberal arts hobby, the core activity, reading, has been shown to be in significant ways embodied. The examples reveal how it is not only in more obviously embodied leisure activities such as sports, in which the body must be considered.

Embodied information refers to how the authors receive information from the senses and the way the body is a sign that can be read by others. To fully understand this, more empirical and theoretical work is needed to reconcile insights from practice theory, phenomenology, embodied cognition and sensory studies.

The paper demonstrates how and why the body has been neglected in information behaviour research, reviews current work and identifies perspectives from other disciplines that can begin to fill the gap.

Fiction and the fiction industry is a first‐class piece of cultural journalism, and is bound to be a lively source of instruction for anyone at all concerned with that “industry”, be he librarian, bookseller, publisher or novelist. Every page abounds with facts and figures, and every page is interesting. Dr Sutherland is exhaustive in his survey, without being exhausting; he is both hard‐headed and light of touch. For the most part, he lets his subject speak for itself.

THE BOUNDARIES have been set now and re‐organisation has come upon the public library world at its set date, approaching, occurring and passing on, like a lunar eclipse.

A LIBRARIAN trying to make up his mind about the rôle of books, information, and culture in the modern world could do a lot worse than read A J Ayer's recent autobiography, Part of my life. Ayer's wide culture is unforcedly apparent. He grew up in a milieu in which learning the classics and composing Latin verses at Eton were the most natural things in the world: to that extent, he belongs to the world of C S Lewis, with whom he was later to clash at Oxford. His favourite authors range from Dickens, through Yeats, to e e cummings (a lifelong friend); and through people like Cyril Connolly he built up the right connections in Bloomsbury. His logical positivism placed him in touch with the current scientific ethos, and his eager appreciation of facts, of information, placed him in good stead during the war, when he was in military intelligence. In a sense, there can be little worth knowing that Professor Ayer does not know (and, of course, few people worth knowing).

THE RECENT SQUEEZE on local government expenditure has highlighted the dissarray that exists in the public library service in England and Wales, and the extraordinary measures being adopted by some authorities. Some of this disorder can perhaps be attributed to widely‐held attitudes prior to local government reorganisation. As a profession we have never been particularly good at co‐ordinating our approach to library services. Traditionally, many chief librarians looked upon their systems as their own unique empire. There was a deep‐rooted reluctance, perhaps even a fear, of pursuing common policies and practices with a neighbouring authority. The reason for those attitudes is not altogether clear, but they reflected an alarming narrowness of vision within our profession.

In his preface to Everyman's encyclopaedia the editor traces the ancestry of such compendia “back via Knight's Encyclopaedia to the great Penny Cyclopaedia published between 1833 and 1843 at the instigation of Lord Brougham by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a body which did much in its day to further the education of ordinary men and women”. It's a good idea to brush up one's sense of this social background by re‐reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. Here, at the beginning of Chapter 38, is a typical group of Top Middlemarchers in discussion:

JOHN SMITH'S assertion that librarianship is ‘getting the right book to the right reader at the right time’ (NLW, July), and Maurice Line's declaration that ‘the sole aim of librarianship is to serve users’ (NLW, September) are, like many truisms, well worth pondering over.

‘EVERY patron of a public library is an individual endowed with free choice. But to what extent is the public library acting as an effective neutraliser of individuality?’

IT WAS THE then Duke of Gloucester who, observing the said Mr Gibbon (of Roman Empire fame) writing, said, to quote as accurately as my reference source will allow, ‘Another damned thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon!’

MY VOTE for the Most Depressing Spectacle of the Month goes to a shelf of leather‐bound, gold‐tooled ‘video classics’ seen in my local video rentals shop. The leather binding and gold lettering looked quite impressive until you touched one of the volumes—Wuthering heights, for example—and realised that this ‘book’ was plastic, every single molecule of it. And empty, unless you counted the video tape.