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BOOKS are among the greatest and most wonderful achievements of human genius, they are also a powerful means of struggle for progress. The book accompanies man all his life; it is a creation of his brain and soul. It reflects the life of mankind and is the result of collective efforts of author and publisher, type‐setter and illustrator. But foremost a book is always and everywhere a social and political phenomenon. One of the most apt evaluations of the book was given by V. I. Lenin in 1917, when he was known to state to A. V. Lunacharsky, “The book is a great force indeed”.

A history of twentieth‐century censorship. Shakespeare's company staged the first production of The Merchant of Venice sometime between 30 July 1596 and 22 July 1598. From the day of that presentation, it is probable that the play has annoyed, perhaps even offended, many who have seen or read it, the source of the offense being the disparaging portrait of a major character, Shylock. On the stage for many years, there have been radically discrepant interpretations of the Jewish usurer. Since the day of Sir Henry Irving, actors and directors have often chosen to present Shylock in a way that transforms the role from that which Elizabethan playgoers may have seen and heard, or may have thought they had seen and heard, to the complex, ambivalent personality depicted in all productions since Irving first projected Shylock as a tragic hero.

The classics will circulate wrote a public librarian several years ago. She found that new, attractive, prominently displayed editions of literary classics would indeed find a substantial audience among public library patrons.

Legal process by its very nature cannot be swift; step by step, it must be steady and sure and this takes time. There is no room for hasty decisions for these would tend to defeat its purpose. Time, however, is of the essence and this is set for various aspects of legal action by limitation of actions legislation, which sets periods after which the case is no longer actionable. The periods are adequate and in civil law, generous to avoid injustice being done. The one serious complaint against the process of law, however, is the unwarrantable delays which are possible despite limitation. From the far‐off days of Equity, when Dickens' Jarndyce v Jarndyce, caricatured and exaggerated as it was, described the scene down to the present when delays, often spoken of in Court as outrageous are encountered, to say nothing of the crowded lists in the High Courts and Crown Courts; the result of the state of society and not the fault of the judiciary. Early in 1980, it was reported that 14,500 cases were awaiting trial in the Southeastern Circuit Crown Court alone. Outside the Courts legal work hangs on, to the annoyance of those concerned; from house purchase to probate. Here, the solicitor is very much his own master, unhampered by statutory time limits and the only recourse a client has is to change this solicitor, with no certainty that there will be any improvement, or appeal to the Law Society.

EVERY librarian in his inmost heart dislikes newspapers. He regards them as bad literature; attractors of undesirable readers; a drain upon the limited resources of the library; and a target against which the detractors of public libraries are constantly battering. From the standpoint of the librarian, newspapers are the most expensive and least productive articles stocked by a library, and their lavish provision is, perhaps, the most costly method of purchasing waste‐paper ever devised. Pressure of circumstances and local conditions combine, however, to muzzle the average librarian, and the consequence is that a perfectly honest and outspoken discussion of the newspaper question is very rarely seen. In these circumstances, an attempt to marshal the arguments for and against the newspaper, together with some account of a successful practical experiment at limitation, may prove interesting to readers of this magazine.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings on jet array instabilities of molten caprolactam. Initial investigations showed that although a suitable range of parameters was found for stable jetting, there were cases where instabilities occurred due to external sources such as contamination.

The inkjet system consisted of a melt supply unit, filtration unit and printhead with pneumatic and thermal control. A start‐up strategy was developed to initiate the jetting trials. A digital microscope camera monitored the printhead nozzle plate to record the jet array stability within the recommended range of parameters from earlier research. The trials with jet instabilities were studied to analyse the instability behaviour.

It was found that instabilities occurred in three forms which were jet trajectory error, single jet failure and jet array failure. Occasionally, the jet with incorrect trajectory remained stable. When a jet failed, bleeding of melt from the nozzle due to the actuations influenced the adjacent jets initiating an array of jets to fail similar to falling dominos.

The research concept is novel and investigating the jet array instability behaviours could give an understanding on jetting reliability issues.

In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum (1996) offers one version of an argument frequently repeated in the history of law-and-literature scholarship; to wit, that the literary imagination performs a salutary function with regard to many domains of modern public life. While law and economics are governed by logics of bureaucratic rationality and utilitarian calculus, literature, in particular the novel, presents a counterdiscourse, inviting us to empathize with others, expanding our moral sense, emphasizing the importance of affect and imagination in the making of a just, humane, and democratic society. Nussbaum's broad goal is a commendable one; concerned that “cruder forms of economic utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis that are…used in many areas of public policy-making and are frequently recommended as normative for others” are, in effect, dehumanizing, she argues for the importance to public life of “the sort of feeling and imagining called into being” by the experience of reading literary texts (1996, p. 3). This sort of feeling and imagining, Nussbaum explains, fosters sympathetic understanding of others who may be quite different from us and a deepened awareness of human suffering.

Whether poet, novelist, or essayist, a writer is influenced by his past — his family, associates, and the places where he has lived. In English literature even if we limit ourselves to the standard texts of English literature classes, we can see that England's geography has had an enormous impact on the country's writers, helping them give “to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.” Consider Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Wordsworth's “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” and Jane Austen's use of Bath in Persuasion.

OUR issue devotes special attention this month to the subject of the library for children. There is a common inclination to regard this subject as the most over‐written in all branches of library literature. It certainly is the part of our work which leads to much sentimental verbiage. These are dangers against which we are on our guard; they may be inevitable, but we do not think they are. As a matter of fact there has been a great deal of talk about this matter by people who have ideas and ideals, but who have had no real experience in applying them. The paper by Mr. Berwick Savers, written for the Library Association Conference, points out very cogently what has been wanting in library work in this country. This question of the children's librarian has not been faced anywhere in what may be called the ultimate manner; that is, as a distinct, specialist branch of library work, requiring high qualifications and deserving good payment. There will be no really successful library work of the kind in Great Britain until this is done.