Vee..The 3d was for extra books. In the 1950s there were two tiers of subscriptions and the A rate entitled a subscriber to the newest publications and a booklet to write in books chosen from the monthly list of publications and newspaper reviews. The library staff would put aside books for the A readers or chose one from their list. The Bs chose their own books from racks that had books which had been out for three months. The advantage was that the books were recently published and popular authors were purchased in multiples so there wasn't too long to wait. They would have been less used so cleaner than those in the Public Libraries. My two sisters and I started work at a Boots Library, which was a part of a large chain of Chemists, after we left school. It was a good and well regarded firm, we got a staff discount from the counters which sold jewellery and stationery as well as many other items in addition to the pharmacy ones. We all later left for Public Service and office work and a better chance of promotion. Boots did have exams to eventually promote an assistant to becoming a librarian but these qualifications weren't recognised by the Public Library system.

What a shame, she was not a great age - only 68. I will see if I can get her books through ILL.

I read The Serpent Garden and enjoyed it. Be prepared, though, it's not strictly historical fiction, there's also a demon involved. But I found that fun. I read another by her, can't remember the name, and wasn't as impressed. I will probably read some more by her. She tells a good story, and has strong female characters ... always a plus in my book(s). :)

Just finished a quite enjoyable read called "The Great Filth: The War Against Disease in Victorian England" by Stephen Halliday (2007). (The same author wrote "The Great Stink" about that hot summer in London when the Thames smelled horrible and affected the politicians at the Houses of Parliament enough to get them in gear about the city drainage system.) The topic was great and I'm always up for a delve into Victorian times, social history and medicine, and so most of this was truly fascinating. And I liked the approach that Haliday took which was more of a big-picture approach and gave appropriate kudos to engineers and architects and some reform-minded politicians who all helped to make public health safer. One ongoing thing that kept annoying me (and this is my permanently switched-on Editor self talking) was the actual format of the book. You could tell that Haliday had done his research - this is good. However, you could also tell that this book was a bunch of essays written at different times and then patched together. There was a lot of repetition and only some vague continuity between the different topics, and I think it's a bit lazy for an author to do this instead of finding new material or reworking the info differently. The thing that galled me the most was that Haliday (writing in 2007, mind you) kept referring to men and women in different ways. When males were first referenced, they had both their first name and their last name (surname) and then after that first mention, were called by their last names only. The women, on the other day, were first mentioned with first name/last name, but then referred to thereafter by their first names. This struck me (as an editor) to be infantilizing for these brave and smart women of the times in comparison to the male characters who were featured. I saw this early in the book, and then saw that it continued as a formatting choice throughout, and it started to quite irritate me. I don't know why Haliday made this choice (or perhaps his editor did). Published in 2007 means that it is recent enough for people to be aware of gender bias in writing, so I don't have an explanation for this. I know - nit-picky, but it affected my overall reading experience. Why not first name/last name as first ref and then revert to last names for everyone regardless of gender? So - content was good (apart from the repetition) and there was a nice bibliography at the back for further reading. And I learned things - but it was all a bit marred by this gender bias thing that has little excuse for existing in this day and age. Speaking of Victorian medicine, whilst we were in London, we visited the Hunterian Museum (housed by the Royal College of Surgeons) and packed with historical medicine artefacts. Fascinating. Here is a link that might be useful: Hunterian Museum (London)