At 08:09 20/09/2010, Richard Coates wrote:
>Scott gives me a good opportunity to add that much of my interest in
>language was stimulated by the holdings of the Grimsby Public
>Library Service, including books by Pei, Ernest Weekley, Simeon
>Potter, Anthony Burgess and similar unfashionable writers whose work
>in making philology and linguistics accessible to an English
>teenager I wouldn't dream of denigrating. The library also held
>"Teach Yourself Samoan" and Bloomfield's "Language" on the open
>shelves. Anyone know such a rich public library in a small town?
The problem is that today public libraries do not hold such books for
long, but sell them off, even if they had them in the first
place. In the early 1970s I read a lot of old books from Morningside
library (Edinburgh), as I know from the notes I took from them I
looked in the library a couple of years ago and all those books were
cleared away of course. If we know what we want these days the
internet makes it much easier to find, but the days of serendipitous
browsing of dusty shelves in unfrequented corners of local libraries are over.
Trevor
Trevor Ogden
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
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