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ONE GROWS UP, so to speak, with the jargon of the profession: soon there is nothing odd in describing a morning‐and‐evening turn of duty by the phrase, ‘I'm split today’. (‘Horizontally or vertically?’ my family used to inquire.) It needs no highly original thought to deduce that librarians abroad have their shop‐talk too, and no doubt all sensible exchange candidates go primed with the word ‘overdue’ in the language of their choice. It was not so with me. I could count and sing and tell the story of the Three Bears in Norwegian, but I could not, with any hope of being understood, say to a borrower, ‘Sorry, it's out’.

MY INTEREST in Robert McLellan's work is a fairly recent one, dating as it does from shortly after my arrival in Scotland five years ago. Several pointers made me anxious to know more of his plays and other writings, not least an article by Miss Moira Burgess. I found, however, that an interest was easier to arouse than to satisfy: bibliographies listed practically nothing by him; my own local collection catalogue (McLellan has been an Arran resident since 1938) showed only two articles, one by and one about him, and inquiries of colleagues elicited only surprise that they could find no more than I had done.

‘IT MIGHT BE SUGGESTED’, wrote George Blake in 1956, introducing the BBC radio‐drama series Annals of Scotland, ‘that Robin Jenkins is potentially the most interesting of the younger Scottish novelists’. Nor has the potential gone unrealized: in October 1969 he received a Scottish Arts Council publication award of £300 for his most recent book, The Holy Tree. On that occasion the Scotsman critic remarked that Jenkins ‘should need less introduction than one feels he does’, and this summarizes the paradox which must for long enough now have been troubling his admirers. Jenkins, besides being a prolific and highly praised novelist, is a remarkably neglected one.

Though the county of Bute has a long and honourable literary history, its associations with song and story are not all likely to be familiar to the man in the street. If his street is located in a town in the industrial West of Scotland, this mythical arbiter may indeed be able to produce from a kind of race memory the rollicking strains of “The Day we went to Rothesay—O”, or, if he inclines to the sentimental, the plaintiff Victorian ballad “Sweet Rothesay Bay”. He may also know about the minister in Millport who prayed for “the Great and Little Cumbraes and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland.”

THE National Reference Library of Science and Invention may be said to be devoted to three R's— reference, research and referral. The purpose of this article is to illustrate this theme, with a picture of the services and activi‐ties of the Library, and to indicate when it can be of help to other libraries. However, it is necessary first to outline briefly the origins and present stage of development of the Library, for despite the amount of publicity it has had, the NRLSI remains relatively little known or little understood compared with the other library departments of the British Museum.

THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE between the larger German and English libraries is that, whereas English libraries like the British Museum and the Bodleian are not lending libraries, the German state libraries are. Hence the difference of emphasis in structure and organization or—put another way: the extreme simplicity of English set against the extraordinary complexity of German libraries. In the Bodleian one is still a person with a name. In the Bavarian State Library one is a computerized number. In the Guildhall Library in London uniformed assistants bring the books to one's place. In the New York City Library small boys dart about on roller skates in the magazine to fetch the books from the stacks. In Munich the books are delivered along rollers controlled by some magnificent robot to one of the five counters to which as a Reader one has been assigned—that is, if the books which one has ordered are present. Often they are not, which is obviously the disadvantage of allowing readers to take them home. Yet even to have obtained confirmation of their absence is an achievement which may have taken days!

For over a hundred years the development of “public libraries” (that is libraries administered by local authorities, not the equally “public” libraries such as the British Museum) has been hesitating, blind, clumsy and uneven; but it is refreshing to remember that all along there have been people who have made a legend of the first librarian of Manchester. Dr. Munford has now done librarianship and history a great service by his latest book recently published by the Library Association. Edwards was not a good librarian, but had a vision of the desirable and possible future of libraries which only now is shown to be valid. The vision and the failures justified the publication of the new life of him, which completely supersedes Thomas Greenwood's book of 1902. Probably no other librarian has left behind him such a mass of letters and diaries as Edwards provided and no previous biographer of a librarian has so methodically and meticulously struggled with a mass of manuscripts such as those which confronted Dr Munford. It is hard to imagine that any other book of similar size has given so many footnotes (all assembled at the end of the book, to the amazing number of 1,564) as references to the material on which Dr. Munford has based his statements. This “portrait”, complete—“warts and all”—would not have been possible if the British Museum and the Manchester Public Libraries had not religiously preserved the great collection of Edwards's diaries and correspondence.

EVEN TO THOSE who profess to have made a study of Scottish literature, Sharpe's name is comparatively unknown. He is often thought of as an obscure antiquarian friend of Scott's, the original of Malachi Malagrowther, an eccentric in a city always famed for its eccentrics. Yet one cannot go very far in the study of ballads and of Scottish popular poetry without coming across his name: it was he who contributed one of the finest and most tersely expressed of all the ballads to Scott's Minstrelsy—‘The Twa Corbies’—as well as giving Scott his version of ‘The Douglas Tragedy’ and ‘Bessie Bell and Mary Gray’. A great deal of the material in Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland—that pioneering work which, like most of Robert Chambers's, has not received the attention it deserves—was provided by Sharpe. In the field of demonology and the study of witchcraft, too, he was an authority: his edition of Law's Memorialls was enriched by copious and erudite footnotes and in his introduction, amounting to 254 quarto pages, he wrote a lively and informative historical survey of witchcraft in Scotland from the earliest times until the end of the eighteenth century.

ALTHOUGH the first Public Libraries (Scotland) Act was placed on the Statute Book in 1853, it was not until 1899 that the Corporation of the City of Glasgow was empowered to establish and maintain public libraries throughout the city. Between 1876 and 1897 four attempts were made to secure public approval for the adoption of the Public Libraries (Scotland) Acts, but when all these efforts proved unsuccessful, the Corporation decided in June, 1888 to include in a Local Bill for submission to Parliament, certain clauses conferring upon themselves the power to become a library authority. Promoted in 1899, the Bill became known as the Glasgow Corporation (Tramways, Libraries, etc.) Act 1899, and the library clauses passed through Parliament without opposition and received Royal Assent on 1st August, 1899. The powers conferred by this Local Act empowered the Corporation: