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British public librarians have long been ambivalent about fiction stock, accepting its contribution to loans statistics, but reticent, even shamefaced, about its content. Once there were frequent articles in the professional press on “the fiction question” as it was called: today there are fewer such, while the volume of research, and the number of conference papers on fiction is disproportionately small compared to the staff time, money and shelf space allotted to it. Whether librarians have made a conscious decision, or the climate of the times has changed, there is now less professional agonizing over novels' role in the book stock. Strangely, however, the result seems to be much the same: observation in a number of libraries suggests that there is still a residual reluctance to accept fiction as a legitimate, important part of the service, needing and deserving as much professional thought and care, and as adequate a level of provision, as the remainder. For example, do stock editors spend as much time, proportionately, to checking the quality of their fiction as they do to subject books.

I WAS standing in a queue at the till in a department store in London, recently, when a woman in front of me, apparently unprovoked, showered racial abuse over the heads of a crowd of lunchtime shoppers. She started with the 20th‐century cliché, ‘They should all be sent back where they came from!’, she continued by accusing the despised minority of all manner of depravity and degeneracy, and climaxed with a comparison between Black Britons and jungle beasts—to the latter's advantage.

WHEN A biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was returned to Kendal library by post from Oxford University with a stamp on the date label of 5 Feb 1916 no one considered this to be very startling news. There was a compliment slip inside apologising for the delay (‘It was lurking in one of our darker corners’). I sent them a brief note thanking them, and that I thought was that.

During the past few years I have attempted unsuccessfully to publish a number of articles on subjects I regard as timely. During the same period I have had eight books published and at least a dozen articles on uncontentious subjects. It would, I feel, be altogether too coincidental if all the articles on socially relevant subjects were illit‐erate, and my other articles and books literate.

‘PLR is not, and was never imagined to be, a cure for the economic anomalies of contemporary authorship’, wrote a supporter in The Author in the summer of 1981. But if there was to be a Bill for authors, that is precisely what it should have addressed itself to, and the defensive tone of the statement suggests the writer knew that was what the majority of authors sought—or, of those responsible for 40,000 titles a year, more would have registered.