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A dealer in old books remarked to me not long since that he had just received an order for forty feet of his wares, with the stipulation that all were to be in well‐preserved old calf bindings, ten feet of quartos, ten of octavos, etc., but with no stipulation as to the price. I was amused and bandied jests with him concerning his customer, but I could gain no further information and was left to speculate, as endlessly as I pleased, concerning the identity and position of a man who purchased books with no regard to their contents.

This paper aimed to inform research or collection development on the topic of Claude Debussy, with particular attention paid to English-language resources that highlight the cross-modal nature of his work.

This objective was achieved by examining primary and secondary sources relating to the works and correspondences of Debussy and those of painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and the works of poet Charles Baudelaire, whose work influenced Debussy.

Holistically studying Debussy and his contemporary influences enables the researcher to develop a richer understanding of Debussy's work.

This paper may have implications for research on James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Charles Baudelaire, Impressionism, and Symbolism.

ONLY a mild flutter in the dovecotes was felt by the discovery, made public in the Justce of the Peace, one, that fines for the detention of library books were unauthorised by Law and, two, that readers who declined to pay them could not be refused access to their own libraries. It is possible that this was known long ago to librarians and is not the reason why a very few libraries do not exact fines. Hewitt, however, tells us that although the practice of charging is universal no machinery exists for the recovery of fines. He does say that while recourse to the courts for their recovery is not to be recommended, exclusion from the use of the library would be admissible. Without arguing for or against fines, the fact that they persist and are in the view of many a commonsense and necessary way of ensuring the return of books, and that the Acts give authority for the making of byelaws for the good management of libraries, there appears to be a case for getting the matter settled one way or other. No librarian wants to act in disregard of law, but it is difficult to get a case heard as, for the sake of the small sum involved in a fine and remembering the relatively large sum involved in a court action, few borrowers will be found to challenge fines. It is our own business to see that our ways are legal.

Of course the predominating subject in British librarianship in the past month was the Manchester Meeting. It was the largest gathering in our recollection, and those who were fortunate enough to attend lived some crowded hours of glorious life. The arrangements showed that the most careful and painstaking labour had gone to their making. The Local Committee and the various librarians in Manchester and the district deserve all possible gratitude, and the Library Association has every reason to congratulate itself upon a conference which ran without fault and which received great and wide publicity.

The institution of food and cookery exhibitions and the dissemination of practical knowledge with respect to cookery by means of lectures and demonstrations are excellent things in their way. But while it is important that better and more scientific attention should be generally given to the preparation of food for the table, it must be admitted to be at least equally important to insure that the food before it comes into the hands of the expert cook shall be free from adulteration, and as far as possible from impurity,—that it should be, in fact, of the quality expected. Protection up to a certain point and in certain directions is afforded to the consumer by penal enactments, and hitherto the general public have been disposed to believe that those enactments are in their nature and in their application such as to guarantee a fairly general supply of articles of tolerable quality. The adulteration laws, however, while absolutely necessary for the purpose of holding many forms of fraud in check, and particularly for keeping them within certain bounds, cannot afford any guarantees of superior, or even of good, quality. Except in rare instances, even those who control the supply of articles of food to large public and private establishments fail to take steps to assure themselves that the nature and quality of the goods supplied to them are what they are represented to be. The sophisticator and adulterator are always with us. The temptations to undersell and to misrepresent seem to be so strong that firms and individuals from whom far better things might reasonably be expected fall away from the right path with deplorable facility, and seek to save themselves, should they by chance be brought to book, by forms of quibbling and wriggling which are in themselves sufficient to show the moral rottenness which can be brought about by an insatiable lust for gain. There is, unfortunately, cheating to be met with at every turn, and it behoves at least those who control the purchase and the cooking of food on the large scale to do what they can to insure the supply to them of articles which have not been tampered with, and which are in all respects of proper quality, both by insisting on being furnished with sufficiently authoritative guarantees by the vendors, and by themselves causing the application of reasonably frequent scientific checks upon the quality of the goods.

Reproduces the main texts of hitherto unpublished reminiscences of the style and influence, as a teacher, of Allyn Abbott Young (1876‐1929) by 17 of his distinguished students. They include Bertil Ohlin, Nicholas Kaldor, James Angell, Lauchlin Currie, Colin Clark, Howard Ellis, Frank Fetter, Earl Hamilton, and Melvin Knight (brother of Frank Knight who, with Edward Chamberlin, was perhaps Young’s most famous PhD student). There has recently been a revival of interest in Young’s influence on US monetary thought and in his theory of economic growth based on endogenous increasing returns. These recollections of his students (addressed to Young’s biographer, Charles Blitch) shed light on why Young has, at least until recently, been renowned more for his massive erudition than for his published writings.

One of the commonest excuses put forward in defence of the practice of treating milk, butter, meat, and other foods with ‘preservative’ drugs no longer possesses even the appearance of validity. Several of the large railway companies are adding refrigerator vans in considerable numbers to their rolling‐stock, and this fact should make it no longer possible for defendants to plead that the necessity of sending food‐products a long distance by rail involves the necessity of mixing preservative chemicals with them. Although the excuse referred to will not bear examination, it is a very specious one, and in those instances where evidence has not been brought forward to refute it, it has produced some effect on the minds of magistrates and others. It cannot be too often pointed out that such substances as boracic acid, salicylic acid, and formaldehyde are dangerous drugs, and that their unacknowledged presence in articles of food constitutes a serious danger to the public. Such substances are not foods, and are not natural constituents of any food. In most instances they are purposely introduced into food‐products to avoid the expense attending the proper production, preparation, and distribution of the food, or to conceal the inferior quality of an article by masking the signs of commencing decomposition or incipient putrefaction, and thus to enable a dishonest producer or vendor to palm off as fresh and wholesome an article which may be not only of bad quality, but absolutely dangerous to the consumer. The use of these substances, in any quantity whatsoever, and the sale of articles containing them, without the fullest and clearest disclosure of their presence, is as gross and as dangerous a form of adulteration as any which has at any time been exposed. In no single instance can it be shown that these drugs are, to quote the words of the Act of 1875, matters or ingredients “required for the preparation or production of a food as an article of commerce,” nor, of course, can it be contended that such substances are “extraneous matters with which the food is unavoidably mixed during the process of collection or preparation.” In reality, even under our inadequate and unsatisfactory adulteration laws, through which the proverbial coach‐and‐four can be so easily driven in so many directions, there ought to be no loophole of escape for the deliberate and dishonest drugger of foods. While the presence of preservative chemicals in any quantity whatever in articles of food constitutes adulteration, wherever the quantity is sufficient to allow the production of the specific “preservative” effect of the substance added, that fact alone is enough to make the food so drugged a food which must be regarded as injurious to the health of the consumer—in view of the inhibitory effect which, by its very nature, the antiseptic must produce on the process of digestion. To our knowledge the food market in this country is flooded with all sorts of inferior food‐products which are rarely dealt with under the Adulteration Acts, and which are loaded with so‐called preservatives. There will be no adequate protection for the public against the consumption of this injurious rubbish until the consumer sees the advantage of insisting upon an authoritative and permanent guarantee of quality with his goods, and until manufacturers of the better class at length find it to be a necessity for their continued prosperity that they should supply, apart entirely from their own statements, an independent and powerful guarantee of this kind.

The purpose of this paper is to address the lack of knowledge of the accounting occupational group in England prior to the formation of professional accounting bodies. It aims to do so by focusing on attempts made by writing masters and accountants to establish a recognisable persona in the public domain, in England, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to enhance that identity by behaving in a manner designed to persuade the public of the professionalism associated with themselves and their work.

The study is based principally on the contents of early accounting treatises and secondary sources drawn from beyond the accounting literature. Notions of identity, credentialism and jurisdiction are employed to help understand and evaluate the occupational history of the writing master and accountant occupational group.

Writing masters and accountants emerged as specialist pedagogues providing the expert business knowledge required in the counting houses of entities that flourished as the result of rapid commercial expansion during the early modern period. Their demise as an occupational group may be attributed to a range of factors, amongst which an emphasis on personal identity, the neglect of group identity and derogation of the writing craft were most important.

The paper highlights Early English Books Online (available at: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (available at: www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/index.htm) and the seventeenth and eighteenth century Burney Collection Newspapers as first class electronic resources now available for studying accounting history from the sixteenth century through to the eighteenth century.

The paper advances knowledge of accounting history by: profiling commercial educators active in England in the early modern period; studying the devices they employed to achieve upward social and economic trajectory; explaining the failure of an embryonic professionalisation initiative; and demonstrating the contingent nature of the professionalisation process.

The latest information from the magazine chemist is extremely valuable. He has dealt with milk‐adulteration and how it is done. His advice, if followed, might, however, speedily bring the manipulating dealer before a magistrate, since the learned writer's recipe is to take a milk having a specific gravity of 1030, and skim it until the gravity is raised to 1036; then add 20 per cent. of water, so that the gravity may be reduced to 1030, and the thing is done. The advice to serve as “fresh from the cow,” preferably in a well‐battered milk‐measure, might perhaps have been added to this analytical gem.

“GIVE a dog a bad name and hang him,” is an aphorism which has been accepted for many years. But, like many other household words, it is not always true. Even if it were, the dog to be operated upon would probably prefer a gala day at his Tyburn Tree to being executed in an obscure back yard.