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This paper attempts to understand how the interaction of natural disasters and human behaviour during wartime led to famines in three regions under imperial control around the Indian Ocean. The socio-economic structure of these regions had been increasingly differentiated over the period of imperial rule, with large proportions of their populations relying on agricultural labour for their subsistence.

Before the war, food crises in each of the regions had been met by the private importation of grain from national or overseas surplus regions: the grain had been made available through a range of systems, the most complex of which was the Bengal Famine Code in which the able-bodied had to work before receiving money to buy food in the market.

During the Second World War, the loss of control of normal sources of imported grain, the destruction of shipping in the Indian Ocean (by both sides) and the military demands on internal transport systems prevented the use of traditional famine responses when natural events affected grain supply in each of the regions. These circumstances drew the governments into attempts to control their own grain markets.

The food crises raised complex ethical and practical issues for the governments charged with their solution. The most significant of these was that the British Government could have attempted to ship wheat to Bengal but, having lost naval control of the Indian Ocean in 1942 and needing warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean in 1943 chose to ignore the needs of the people of Bengal, focussing instead on winning the war.

In each of the regions governments allowed/encouraged the balkanisation of the grain supply – at times down to the sub-district level – which at times served to produce waste and corruption, and opened the way for black markets as various groups (inside and outside government ranks) manipulated the local supply.

People were affected in different ways by the changes brought about by the war: some benefitted if their role was important to the war-effort; others suffered. The effect of this was multiplied by the way each government ‘solved’ its financial problems by – in essence – printing money.

Because of the natural events of the period, there would have been food crises in these regions without World War II, but decisions made in the light of wartime exigencies and opportunities turned crises into famines, causing the loss of millions of lives.

In the second edition of Greenwood's “Public Libraries,” 1887, p. 137, there is a description of the Dent Indicator, from which it may be gathered that such an indicator was actually constructed. The inventor, however, is of opinion that his idea never got so far as realization in material form, though there can be hardly any doubt that Mr. Dent's indicator is the first to combine indicating with charging, and that it suggested several succeeding devices. His account of it is interesting, as it mentions the existence of an early form of card indicator which has since been reinvented in various styles. “A certain Mr. Christie, Librarian of the Constitution Hill Branch Library (Birmingham), about 1868, constructed a small rack with cards bearing the titles of a selection of the books in history, science, &c, open to the public, and the presence of one of these tickets in the rack indicated that the book was ‘in.’ If anyone wished to take one of the books thus shown, he lifted the ticket out of the rack (there was no glass in front) and handed it to the attendant who put it in a box till the book came back, and then replaced it almost anywhere in the rack. This gave me an idea that the cumberous system of day‐book, posting‐book, and constant piles of books to be marked off as returned might be done away with, if tickets in a rack representing every number in the library were substituted for book‐entry, &c.” Mr. Dent's improvement upon this idea consisted in the provision of a series of numbered shelves in columns, with spaces between to take the borrowers' cards when the books were out. The back of the borrower's card was to be ruled to allow of numbers and dates being pencilled thereon, and, of course, the presence of a borrower's card under a number indicated a book “ out.”

The utterance at a recent council estimates meeting of an Alderman to the effect that he opposed increase of the book‐fund of the libraries in the town because, whenever he wanted a book, he bought it, was, we suspect, a vainglorious one used for a special purpose and time. It was obviously, too, that of a man who may read on occasion, but is not a regular user of books. There are many such and, no doubt, their limited point of view is to be encouraged, so far as book‐purchase is concerned. What it disregards, or does not understand, is that the real reader cannot easily contemplate life without books; he never has enough of them, even if he is not a hoarder of them. There are thousands such. Their homes are not large enough, and their purses are too limited, for them to buy everything they want to read. The “Alderman” can feel that books are cheap; he spends more, if he has the means, on a box of cigars, or a bottle of whiskey, than any ordinary book costs. A single visit to a theatre with his wife (with the inevitable accompanying dinner or supper and transport) costs him more than a shelf of them. If he throws away the book when read, or rejected—for only a few such books are read through by the type under consideration—that is of little more con‐sideration than his disposal of cigar ash or used theatre tickets. In this stringent time the greater part of the community depends upon the borrowed book. Inevitably this will increasingly be the case. Every man and woman, however, who loves books desires to possess them, and every wise librarian encourages that desire. It can reduce the use of libraries very little, if at all, and our business as librarians should be to provide for the literate nation, indeed to assist its making. There are many ways in which this might be done—the provision of lists on “Books for Every Home” with clear notes on why, for it must be realized that not every citizen knows the books that are commonplace tools. In how many homes, for instance, is Whittaker's Almanack to be found? A reference book, of course; but almost the first need of a household is a set of the best tools of this sort. Has any library yet issued a list with this special intention? Say, “Six Books necessary to Every Home”? We assume that when a reader is passionately drawn to a book he must buy it, but such attraction is mainly felt by those who are already book‐lovers. For others there are such questions as, where shall we put the books suggested? An answer may be that every librarian, in his own area, should urge that built‐in bookcases should be a feature in every house plan. He might do much to solve a real problem. He can continue, too, to assist book‐buying by his periodic exhibitions of books for prizes, presents (Christmas and birthday) and help to answer the question, “What books of great literature ought to be in every home for children and for life‐keeping?” His every convert would become also a life user of libraries.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

This paper aims to examine the attractiveness of the Tong Ren Tang (TRT) as a Chinese corporate heritage tourism brand and consider the significance of TRT for Chinese national identity. The study considers the saliency of Balmer’s augmented role identity notion vis-à-vis corporate heritage institutions/corporate brands. Insights are made from and for corporate heritage, heritage tourism and national identity literature.

A conceptual model comprising five hypotheses was developed and this informed a survey-based questionnaire administered to domestic tourists/customers visiting Tong Ren Tang’s flagship shop in Beijing.

The attractiveness to domestic Chinese tourists/customers of the TRT corporate heritage tourism brand was found to be attributable to its multiple role identities: national, corporate, temporal, familial and imperial. As such, this study lends credence to Balmer’s augmented role identity notion. Chinese domestic tourists/customers – as members of an ethnic Chinese community – in visiting TRT not only consume an extant corporate heritage by tangible and intangible means but can also be seen to express, and reaffirm, their sense of Chinese national identity.

For TRT’s managers, there should be an appreciation that the attractiveness of TRT as a corporate heritage tourism brand rests not only on what it sells but also in what it symbolises in national and cultural terms. This finding is applicable to the managers of many other corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brands.

Adopting a primordial perspective, the TRT pharmacy was found to be of singular significance to China’s national identity. Traditional Chinese Medicine, Confucian and Daoist religious/philosophical and China’s erstwhile Imperial polity are significant and enduring precepts of Chinese national identity. As such the TRT flagship shop/brand is of singular importance, as China has eviscerated much of its cultural heritage – particularly in relation to its corporate heritage brands.

This is the first empirical study to focus on corporate heritage tourism brands and one of the first studies to examine a Chinese corporate heritage/corporate heritage tourism brand. Also significant in focussing on the TRT corporate heritage brand. Established in 1669, TRT’s history spans five centuries: a corporate provenance which is exceptional within the People’s Republic of China. The study links the corporate brand notion with the nascent corporate heritage brand domain and the established area of heritage tourism.

It tends to be called the corner shop, mainly because it occupied a corner building for extra window space, but also due to the impetus given to the name by television series seeking to portray life as it used to be. The village grew from the land, a permanent stopping place for the wandering tribes of early Britain, the Saxons, Welsh, Angles; it furnished the needs of those forming it and eventually a village store or shop was one of those needs. Where the needs have remained unchanged, the village is much as it has always been, a historical portrait. The town grew out of the village, sometimes a conglomerate of several adjacent villages. In the days before cheap transport, the corner shop, in euphoric business terms, would be described as “a little gold mine”, able to hold its own against the first introduction of multiple chain stores, but after 1914 everything changed. Edwardian England was blasted out of existence by the holocaust of 1914–18, destroyed beyond all hope of recovery. The patterns of retail trading changed and have been continuously changing ever since. A highly developed system of cheap bus transport took village housewives and also those in the outlying parts of town into busy central shopping streets. The jaunt of the week for the village wife who saw little during the working days; the corner shop remained mainly for things they had “run out of”. Every village had its “uppety” madames however who affected disdain of the corner shop and its proprietors, preferring to swish their skirts in more fashionable emporia, basking in the obsequious reception by the proprietor and his equally servile staff.

THE note of the Conference at Harrogate was the question of unemployment in relation to libraries. The arguments advanced were intended for the wider public rather than for librarians, and reproduced a now fairly familiar argument that the issues of books from libraries have increased by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the depression. It is quite clear that many men who normally would not read quite so much have turned to books for consolation and guidance. The fact that branch libraries were closed at Glasgow as an economy measure, and were afterwards re‐opened under the force of public opinion, would emphasize the opinion generally held that in times of economic stress it may be an even greater economy to increase expenditure upon libraries than to curtail it. This argument is, of course, in a region which the average material mind of our governors cannot always reach. It is nevertheless true, and the Conference provided ample evidence of its truth.

Libraries must actively support humanities text files, but we must remember that to focus exclusively on texts tied to specific systems is to put ourselves in opposition to the needs of the researchers we intend to serve. A working model of the sort of system and resource provision that is appropriate is described. The system, one put in place at the University of Michigan, is the result of several years of discussions and investigation. While by no means the only model upon which to base such a service, it incorporates several features that are essential to the support of these materials: standardized, generalized data; the reliance on standards for the delivery of information; and remote use. Sidebars discuss ARTFL, a textual database; the Oxford Text Archive; InteLex; the Open Text Corporation; the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI); the machine‐readable version of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edition; and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities.

This is indeed the age of revolution, when timeless attitudes are changing and new ways of living being born. To most it is a bewildering complex, with uneasy forbodirtgs of the outcome. Improvement and change, there must always be—although change is not necessarily progress—but with unrest in the schools, universities and industry, one naturally questions if this is the right time for such sweeping reorganization as now seems certain to take place in local government and in the structure of the national health service. These services have so far escaped the destructive influences working havoc in other spheres. Area health boards to administer all branches of the national health service, including those which the National Health Service Act, 1946 allowed local health authorities to retain, were recommended by the Porritt Committee a number of years ago, when it reviewed the working of the service.