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The circumstances of the foundation of the Marx Memorial Library are recounted, and the history of the building which houses it described. The library’s contents and significance are discussed and a full range of extension activities, including a history of education classes, is examined. The present activities and use of the library are noted.

Applying social concepts to the social relations that the entrepreneur maintains, this research seeks to identify the impact of these relationships, and the learning that might result from them, on the decision‐making process. A social and conversational model of experiential learning is put forward, where learning and influence are seen to emerge as part of an ongoing negotiated process. This argument complements Kolb's “fundamentally cognitive” theory of experiential learning, by challenging the view that the learner should be viewed as an “intellectual Robinson Crusoe”, and stating that even when an individual reflects and theorises their thoughts have a social character. Data were collected using critical incident technique through one‐to‐one in‐depth interviews over several weeks. The paper goes some way to confirm the importance of networks in the business development process, helping further to define how networks exist. The learning identified, is understood therefore as part of an ongoing negotiated process within a complex network of domestic, voluntary, commercial and professional relations.

ONE CAN BE forgiven for worrying about the ‘Peter principle’ when taking up a post on the practising side of the profession after nine years teaching librarianship.

TO librarians the above comment, appearing as it does in a work offering new ways of looking at literature, is yet another warning from the world outside that other forms of record than traditional print now need to be taken seriously as evidence of the world about us. Print is inert, anonymous, impersonal, distancing. To be sure the printed word moves, instructs, enlarges, recreates us—but after its own fashion. The introduction of audio and video recording into public and private discourse amplifies messages which have hitherto had to lie on a page, in new and revealing ways, to such an extent that we may ask if the rebirth of oral communication doesn't take us back to pre‐print society? The Greeks, who enlarged the frontiers of culture to its limits, were always hostile to writing as record; their habit was to learn and perceive orally, and only in the sunset of that civilisation, the Hellenistic Age, did silent record, the signature of things, become important. The Phaedrus reads almost enigmatically to us of the late twentieth century: it is the final summary of a tradition just before its decay. The first librarians of the New Order of Alexandria seem to us the saviours of Greek culture. Yet they were not mere preservers but also contributors—poets, historians, biographers. The librarian as a maker, a participant in the process of transmission, not passive collaborator: this is a role denied to him ever since Alexandria. The instruments now available to us could change things as radically again if their potential be understood.

This article has been condensed from a recorded interview with F G B Hutchings—one of a series in which librarians past and present discuss themselves and their professional experience, undertaken and prepared by the College of Librarianship Wales. The interviewer is David Gerard, whose contributions are printed in italic type.

I MUST THANK David Gerard for responding so warmly to my review of Mr Murison's The public library in Human world 13; and I must thank Mr Murison for responding to the double onslaught (in NLW March) so effectively. (It was not, by the way, a concerted attack, though Mr Murison might be excused for thinking so, especially in view of his other trials.) And if I gave the impression of thinking of him as rather dim and unquestioning, I must simply apologise; this was not my intention. I chose to review his book because it typifies some of our vast social problems in an exceptionally clear‐cut way; because it demonstrates, through the clarity of its presentation, both the virtues and the limitations of socialised thought. This is not, I think, an insult.

Ars est celare artem seems to be an appropriate motto for the library publishing world. At least that is the sour conclusion reached by one unsuccessful editor in search of a publisher, his MS—the text of a week's conference on the relationship between public libraries, the arts, and the community of no apparent interest to our professional communicants. The rich thesaurus of thought, word and even deed lay, a battered typescript in the bottom drawer of his desk, no temptation whatsoever to the moguls of publishing; not even to the college which begat it. The cover was stained, not with the Tears of the Muses, but with the coffee cups of readers unmoved by the prospect that their terse rejection might be the murder of a gallant enterprise. They were as lachrymose as those Muses in their regrets, but firm in the conviction that symposia were not selling this year.

When his first full‐length book Libraries and cultural change, was published, Ronald Benge stepped forward as the compulsive conscience of our time, a happy worrier about virtually all things in heaven or hell, libraries providing a convenient locus for his professional and personal experience. Three further books written by him have been essentially a continuation of the same anxious questioning about the world in which he and his profession stand. There seems no reason why the tetralogy completed to date, Libraries and cultural change (1970); Communication and identity (1972); Cultural crisis and libraries in the Third World (1980) and the last, here reviewed, Confessions of a lapsed librarian. should not continue further as from his unquiet retirement in Barcelona he surveys the condition of his profession.