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LET us be quite clear at the outset as to the meaning of the common terms used about the Theatre. The Theatre itself is a place for viewing or seeing things. The thing it presents to our vision is the Drama. Drama consists of people doing things. It takes the form of a play, which is a method of passing time when there is nothing better to do. This play may be a comedy, a tragedy, a farce or a melodrama. A comedy gets its name from komos, a binge, and ode, a song. It is a composition intended to be part and parcel of a binge. The word tragedy is tragos, a goat, and ode, a song. Some fool says that a tragedy is so called because a he‐goat was presented to the winners in a competition for sad and elevating choral performances. There is not the slightest evidence for this. A “goat song” is as plain a piece of description as a “swan song.” It is a song, delivered with a peculiar bleating intonation, about a certain human quality shared by mankind with the goat—that of butting furiously and hopelessly against the facts of life. Farce comes from the Italian farcio, I stuff. It means a haggis. It means an hour or two filled with anything that comes into the heads of the author or the actors.

ONE of the most remarkable men I ever met, I told young Mr. Cayley, was a chap called Berthold Viertel. One day we were discussing this very matter, and he said to me, Many people can write the first two acts of a play but to make the last act is one of the attributes of the Almighty and so it is with Life itself.

A correspondent writes:—The interesting first stave of the Clyde River Anthology in the Library Review reminds one that there are several librarian bards and, occasionally, the library itself has been a subject for the poet. This is natural enough; association with books begets books and, in prose, it is possible that, many as are the library journals now published, they are not spacious enough to hold all the writings of librarians. But poets are another matter; they are fewer; they work in a field which only a few cultivate with any ardour or seriousness. We have them, nevertheless. You have already at times drawn some attention to them, but I cannot remember any sufficient notice of some of them. For example, James Ormerod, who passed from us only a year or so ago, when he was 44 published a collection, Tristram's Tomb (Elkin Mathews), containing poems written over the years from 1903. It is a good volume, traditional in form, the themes, Caedmon, Cuchulain, the other Arthurian legend suggested by the title and some more than ordinary lyrics and sonnets. Twenty years later, in 1948, he published a slim volume of three plays, two of them, a somewhat violent classical story, Periander and Cormac, and a northern legend, Steengard, are in firm and effective blank verse, the third and title story being the Burmese Wife, a sort of Madame Butterfly tragedy in prose (Mitre Press). They read well; their theatre possibilities I am unable to assess.

THE literary gift is not one that should be buried in a napkin and hidden in the back garden. It should be farmed out in some remunerative way.

BY “it” I mean, of course, the swag. By the swag I do not mean what the late Lord Birkenhead (now, no doubt, with God) called glittering prizes. You remember the delightful characters in Jeremiah whose hearts were full of cunning and wickedness like a big cage full of birds and who waxed fat and shone. I have no means of studying such persons. I am a member of the lower middle section of the middle classes—that is to say, the so‐called professional classes. I have no access to the shining ones except by the area entrance. So I cannot tell you by what methods they accumulate the dough.

We all seem to be a good deal worried about what to do with our poets. How are they to earn a living? Is poetry a whole‐time job? And, on an all together higher level, what ought to be their environment and what influences should be allowed to play upon them?

PERIODICAL LITERATURE is notoriously afflicted by a high infant mortality rate. Literary magazines in particular seem to exhibit all the survival instincts of a claustrophobic lemming. It is therefore a special pleasure to see an avowedly ‘bookish’ magazine—and a Scottish one at that—celebrate its fiftieth birthday. Fifty years of a Scottish literary periodical! It is rather like running up a cricket score at football. Even more extraordinary is the fact that these fifty years have been achieved under only two editors. R. D. Macleod, the founding editor, ran the magazine for 37 years, while his successor, W. R. Aitken, has been in charge for, as he puts it, ‘a mere 13’.

THE changes in London local government which came into operation on 1st April, 1965, cut across the existing regional library bureaux organisation.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.

SYDNEY GOODSIR SMITH had a long and fully documented essay, ‘Trahison des Clercs or the Anti‐Scottish Lobby in Scottish Letters’, in Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. II, No. 2, October 1964, in the course of which he wrote: