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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.

Post 9/11 events not only exposed the visible and invisible aspects of the often intertwined self‐interest of political, economic and especially religious elites, but also presented a practical and ideological vacuum susceptible to “once and for all” opportunistic fantasies of ultra and Neo‐conservative, cum religious, fanatics. The purpose of this paper is to counter balance the constant flow of Neo‐liberal and religious‐fundamentalist propaganda that is having a destructive effect on hard‐won civil ideals and democratic freedoms.

This paper presents a study of the relationship between visible and invisible power in the context of a historical study of the great age of tolerance and co‐existence between Jews, Muslims and Christians. The paper uses Benvenisti's “double history” methodology to recover what is visible on the surface and the “buried history” of what is invisible to discern the implications the Spanish Convivencia has for contemporary debates over political and religious “purity”.

This paper discovers dangerous signs of a continuing ahistorical hubris amongst elites and others that denies the historical evidence for the possibility of mutual accommodations between political and religious communities. This paper locates the need to recover lost, or discounted, multiple histories and (in)visible portents of a future other than the triumphalism of Western, especially “exceptionalist” US interests.

This paper demonstrates the need for more research into the use/misuse of historical evidence within (in)visible power mechanisms designed to serve ideological and hegemonic interests.

In our uncertain age, this paper is notable for developing a historically grounded vision of a real‐politic new world order based on mutual accommodation and respect.

Japan: The land, the myth, the legend. Hondas. Karoke bars. Kimonos. Ancestor worship. Total quality management. Golf. Kabuki. Sushi. What's the real story? What's underneath the lacquer? What's just behind the screen? We asked various people what came to mind when they thought of “Japan” and here's what they had to say:

This paper aims to examine the lives of early twentieth century opera star Louise Homer and her composer husband Sidney, and their attempts to manage two successful careers and a family of six children. Almost 100 years ago, the Homers – a rare example of a two‐career family – employed several adaptive strategies that academic researchers later suggested for twenty‐first century dual‐career couples.

Considering the work‐family literature, two modern models of managing and coping with the stresses of dual careers were examined and the Homer family were then considered to determine whether they employed similar strategies. Letters were used from the Homers and their children, other original documents and secondary research in investigating the couple's efforts to handle the challenges of dual‐careers when the concept of a woman pursuing a profession outside the home was a novelty.

Several adaptive strategies recently “discovered” to be used by upper‐income dual‐career couples with children seem just as applicable to 1911 when the Homers' fifth child was born. The findings underscore the idea that challenges perceived as unusual and unique to one generation have been dealt with successfully by past generations.

The paper provides an historical perspective on newly suggested strategies for dual‐career couples in the work‐family literature. Such strategies have been used for at least a century even though the dual‐career concept only became prominent in the last four decades. This paper is one of a few that examines dual‐career couples in an historical context, and indicates how the past can inform those who face contemporary workplace phenomena.

A multimodal perspective highlights the importance of attending to the different modes, mostly verbal and visual, which organizations use when conveying messages. We complement this perspective by adding an additional layer, namely the medium through which messages appear. We suggest that organizations can fine-tune messages not only by playing with possible interactions across modes, but also across media. We build our reasoning around the communication of identity claims. Specifically, we are interested in how identity elements are referenced in verbal and visual modes of meaning making, and how these modes interrelate both with one another and with the respective channels of communication on which they appear. We propose that organizations differentially select identity elements across diverse media and draw on specific identity elements modally in their quest for legitimate distinctiveness. We propose three ways in which multimodal identity claims interact: intensifying, in which messages draw from the same theme to reinforce claims; complementing, in which messages complement each other to enhance meaning; and transposing, in which a dominant theme in one message is transposed into another theme elsewhere. We provide an illustration with identity claims made by single-malt Scotch whisky distilleries.

Before I arrive at discussing the fundamentals of music bibliography I think we should take a very close look at the word ‘bibliography’ and make sure that we know what it really means. In countless books and dictionaries I have looked up the definition, and the general consensus of opinion is that it may have two meanings. Firstly, a list of books relating to a given subject or author and, secondly, the careful and accurate description of certain books, either by an author or on a specific subject, with literal transcriptions of the title‐pages, sufficient information for identification between one edition or issue and another, size, gatherings, pages, measurements, and so forth. This is a fact of which I need not remind a company of librarians, but I want to make a clear distinction between the two forms that a bibliography may have. Personally, I do not care for the first meaning at all and can never stretch my imagination so far as to flatter a mere list of books by calling it a bibliography. It is not a bibliography at all, it is a checklist, a simple list of books for guidance to the reader wanting to refer to other books on the same subject or, alternatively, by the same author. In Mr. Arundell Esdaile's A student's manual of bibliography (Allen & Unwin, 1931) all such are called ‘List of Books’, and this, I maintain, is the correct heading. A bibliography is something far larger, more involved, intricate, and detailed. The new Grove uses the word ‘bibliography’ for a list of books about a composer, and a list of works composed by the composer is designated ‘Catalogue of Works’.