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TWENTY‐ONE YEARS AGO I was a publisher and a struggling one. After the war two friends and myself had started a new firm. Our first five books had all been slim volumes of poetry, and although we had been lucky with these—they had all covered their costs and received good notices in the press—we had not made a penny profit. The expense of running an office, even a one‐room affair, was eating into our savings, and it was at the moment when our small capital looked dangerously low that Ghandi's autobiography came our way. It seemed a godsend. We all three thought our fortunes were made.

IN THE WILLIAM GOLDING CANON, his first novel Lord of the Flies (1954) remains his most famous, and his third Pincher Martin (1956), his most controversial. Both are concerned with castaways and their fight for survival.

THE DEATH SHIP is the most famous of all B. Traven's books. When it first came out in Germany in 1935, it sold over 200,000 copies before it was banned. It is subtitled ‘The Story of an American Sailor’—although it could as well be called ‘The Story of a Hero without a name’. Perhaps the term ‘Hero’ needs definition in this context, since ‘the song of the real…hero of the sea has not yet been sung’, writes the author in the first chapter.

BOTH these passages are dated November 14th and were set down in the midst of a World War, the first in 1916, the second in 1942. They are not, however, the entries from one man's journal. W. N. P. Barbellion and Denton Welch were both twenty‐five when they wrote them, and each was dying of an incurable disease.

T. S. ELIOT often showed a preoccupation with childhood, and at times this preoccupation showed itself as a search for a lost Eden. In Burnt Norton the leaves are alive with the laughter of children:

WHY ARE THEY neglected or forgotten, those minor (sometimes nearly major) novelists of the first two decades of this century? They have far more than period interest; some of the novels are, in fact, historical, with a theme shaped by historical events. The novelists were all sound craftswomen, scrupulous and professional, having three excellent, even essential talents: that of telling a tale, that of creating character and presenting it in action and dialogue, and that of indicating background. They none of them wrote to order or in a set pattern to be repeated in the next novel.

THE POPULARITY of Hamewith and its author was quite phenomenal in the north‐east of Scotland. It is a significant mark of the affection in which the author was held by the community at large that he was soon popularly known as ‘Hamewith’ himself, in the same way as a farmer in that airt comes to be known by the name of his place. Hamewith was first published by Wyllie & Son, Aberdeen, in 1900. By 1909 a new and more elaborate edition was called for, with an introductiion by Andrew Lang, then Scotland's leading littérateur, and published by Constable in London. By 1912, when he was entertained to an official public dinner in Aberdeen, Charles Murray, who had emigrated to South Africa in 1888 at the age of 24, was then Secretary for Public Works in the Union of South Africa. It is important to note that Murray spent practically the whole of his working life (1888–1924) in South Africa, and wrote practically all his verse in exile. He is by no means the only Scottish writer to have seen his native land more clearly from a distance. One thinks, for example, of Stevenson in Samoa, Grassic Gibbon in Welwyn Garden City, and George Douglas Brown in London.

These notes on Sir Walter Scott by John Galt, here published for the first time, have been transcribed by Dr Hamilton B. Timothy, Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and Galt Scholar at the University of Western Ontario, from a manuscript among the material given him by Henry Gordon Harvey Smith, Q.C., a great‐grandson of John Galt, and his sister, Mrs Muriel Harvey Turner, of Winnipeg. John Galt's youngest son, Alexander, with whom Galt's widow made her home after the novelist's death in 1839, became the Hon. Sir Alexander Galt and Canada's first Federal Finance Minister; from him John Galt's library and miscellaneous papers passed to his youngest daughter, Annie Prince Galt, who married Dr W. Harvey Smith, a distinguished opthalmologist. (In 1930 he had the rare honour of holding at the same time presidency of both the British Medical Association and the Canadian.) His carefully augmented collection of Galt family papers, inherited by his son and daughter, has now been passed to Dr Timothy for use in connexion with his study, The Galts: a Canadian Odyssey. At the same time the family collection of John Galt's writings—in sixty‐eight volumes, many from the novelist's own library—was presented to the library of the University of Western Ontario. For permission to print these interesting notes we are indebted to Mr Harvey Smith and Mrs Turner. The annotations initialled C are by Dr Robert Hay Carnie of the University of Calgary.

‘Nothing’, Winston Churchill assured the readers of Nash's Pall Mall Magazine in 1925, ‘makes a man more reverent than a library’, and to prove his point, imagined a day spent browsing amongst a really large collection of books. Such a day could end only in despair at the sight of the ‘vast, infinitely‐varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved’; to read, to admire and to enjoy even a few of the treasures of saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers is beyond our time on earth. ‘But if you cannot read them’, he continued,