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A YEAR having now elapsed since I concluded the sale of Clive Bingley Ltd, and the contract of sale having contained, at my insistence, a provision that I would remain with the company for not less than six months (to ensure a satisfactory transfer to the new regime) and not more than twelve months (to prevent the new regime being lumbered with an old fuddy‐duddy), I have now resigned my employment with Clive Bingley Ltd, and with the associated companies set up last year to encompass its projected expansion, namely K G Saur Ltd and KGS Reference Services Ltd. In lieu of my former directorships, I have agreed to act as a consultant to these companies for as long as either of us thinks I can be of service to them, a status which recognises the role 1 have in practical terms been playing during the months since the companies abandoned Pembridge Road for plushier new offices in the West End of London.

YOU WILL HAVE seen, no doubt, recent announcements that my wife and I have sold our book‐publishing business of Clive Bingley Ltd to the Munich‐based firm of international reference publishers, Verlag Dokumentation.

WITH, several days later, some residue yet of disbelief, allow me to tell you that at the end of October L actually went dancing. After an interval of 15 years since I last electrified my system in similar fashion, I may further tell you that dancing is no longer what it was.

TRY THIS ONE, if you are not susceptible to apoplectic fits!

MELVYN BARNES, Borough Librarian & Arts Officer of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (London), was asked to prepare a report for his libraries committee on the possibility of selling withdrawn library books to the public—that rumbling bandwagon which inevitably looks attractive to local authorities in hard times.

I HAVE learned, with considerable relief, that the Library Association is taking no notice whatever of the peculiar suggestion in NLW's editorial last month that they rush not to appoint a new Secretary to succeed Mr Hilliard in September.

I AM EARLY on parade this month, dear readers, because during the first week in March, when I should have constructed this column, I had a series of important meetings in a village called Alpbach to execute business contracts with ski‐instructors and hoteliers and the like. You people who work in the public domain don't realise the heavy pressures we businessmen have to face.

DIFFICULT to judge whether obstinacy, optimism or mere force of habit was the prime motivation for the reintroduction in Parliament in late January of another PLR Bill— effected by prominent campaigner Lord (Ted) Willis.

I MUST SAY, I was astonished to read in the editorial in the November issue of Assistant librarian the bald declaration that AL ‘is broke’. I mean, whatever will the printers think?

I AM NOW IN my annual condition of physical incapacitation as a result of my persistently misguided belief that I am not too fat and elderly to play cricket.