Thriller fiction written in English during the 1930s provides evidence of the concerns and prejudices of that decade. Thrillers written later but set in the 1930s include supplementary historical and background information. Together, and set in their historical contexts, they provide a unique perspective on the decade. The thrillers in this survey all have Russian or Soviet or Communist characters. They reveal the visible presence of Russians and Communists in British society, show the social problems within that society, and highlight major European problems. They reflect fear of Communism rather than of the Soviet people.

In eighteenth-century Finland, the clergy was one of the dominant, elite groups that took part in all the forums of the early public sphere. In the Lutheran realm of Sweden, the history of reading is inseparable from the Lutheran Church's persistent teaching of the Catechism. Besides their role as preachers and teachers, several Finnish churchmen took an active role in the Finnish book trade as well. When, by the end of the eighteenth century, book production increased and secular literature challenged religious literature, the works of philosophers linked to Enlightenment were among the new literature that found its way into Finnish book collections so far dominated by religious books. Both preventive and post-publication censorship was used to prevent the import of dangerous literature, and the writings of French philosophers were repeatedly banned. Despite the censorship, Enlightenment literature remained accessible to the Finnish audience. The ideas of the Enlightenment aroused enthusiasm as well as suspicion in the clerical estate. Seen from a comparative perspective, the Enlightenment in Finland was never distinctively anticlerical. The book collections of the Finnish clergymen and professors of theology provide proof that their interests besides theology lay in different fields of natural science, philosophy, and secular literature. Among the religious literature, authors of the Enlightenment are frequently listed.

Throughout the twentieth century, the book trade in Lithuania was influenced by momentous political and cultural developments. Following the abolition of press prohibition in 1904, the book trade entered a new period of national book distribution. In addition to being a vehicle for business interests, the book trade was also an essential arena for cultural activity. Favourable conditions for the commercial development of the book trade were created within the period of the Independent Republic of Lithuania from 1918 to 1940, which was interrupted by the Soviet occupation. The period of Soviet rule between 1940 and 1990 was one in which the ideological function of the book impacted greatly on publishing and the book trade activities. After the restoration of the Independent Republic, the Lithuanian book trade and other business sectors had to redress the losses of the Soviet years and take up the challenge of meeting the changing cultural and informational demands of society. This article explains the historical development of the Lithuanian book trade and shows how past forces have influenced its current condition. It also identifies a series of problems facing the book trade and suggests ways of coping with them.

This article presents four perspectives for observing changes in librarianship in Denmark in the twentieth century. These perspectives give rise to the following questions: 1) How has librarianship renegotiated the concept of the professional according to demands from society and in the light of different definitions of the concept?; 2) Which identities have librarians held in the twentieth century?; 3) How has the identity of the public employee been articulated in the twentieth century?; 4) How have curricula from the Royal School of Library and Information Science defined librarians in relation to society? The article is not empirical in its scope but should be seen as a reflection on how to view observations on librarianship. The conclusion of the article presents aspects for further study. These further studies could be focused on the relation between librarianship and the articulation of the public employee.

This paper proposes a methodology through which to examine the history of generic novels. It is an attempt to reconstruct publishing history using the internal evidence of the books themselves. A key assumption is that popular literature genres are constructed in and through the writings of individual authors who use the codes and conventions of the genre and perpetuate the genre, but who also contribute to modifying and changing the genre. The methodology is based on the view that in the area of popular culture producers of generic cultural products are themselves, at some level, already consumers of the generic cultural products. This means that in popular culture consumption is always a prerequisite of popular culture production. Northern Ireland Troubles thrillers will be used to illustrate the method. The Troubles thriller has been chosen as a generic formation through which to actualize the methodology because, based as it is on a material historical conflict, it is rich in ideological content and contested representational signs. To map out material instances of intertextuality, the method will employ analytical concepts drawn from semiotics, specifically, paradigms and syntagms, which have their origins in Saussurean linguistics.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the influence of Buddhism on the origin of libraries in Sri Lanka from the third century BC to fifth century AD. Contributions made by Buddhist monks and Buddhist kings in this connection too are discussed. A developed education system and scholarly personnel are essential prerequisites for the establishment of a library tradition. Throughout much of history, education systems developed side by side with religious systems. Sri Lanka was not an exception to this regard. Arahat Mahinda introduced Buddhism to Sri Lanka in the third century BC and it soon took root in the country. With the establishment of Buddhism, Buddhist education came into existence and that education enabled Buddhist monks to hand down the Tripitaka and its commentaries orally for centuries. In the first century BC Buddhist scriptures were written and manuscripts were kept at Mahavihara centres for the first time in history. Subsequently, copies of these manuscripts were sent to other temples. Thus, depositing of the Tripitaka and commentaries can be regarded as the origin of libraries in Sri Lanka. These libraries consisted not only of the Tripitaka and its commentaries, but also other Buddhist books too. Buddhist scholars were motivated to write religious books as it was considered to be a meritorious act. Further, libraries had the reputation for production and distribution of Buddhist texts, which attracted foreign scholars to the country.

Traces the history of the first printing presses in Finland, and describes the method of publishing printed works through the subscription system. Examines the emergence of the publication of printed dissertations, as well as of convenient compendia and formats.

For the Victorians, just as for us, information and knowledge were being used and manipulated in a complex series of ways to sell, to inform, and to represent a culturally fluid and dynamic information society. Based upon a detailed empirical study of every weekly issue of the British Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News ( ILN) for a period of twelve months between May 1842 and May 1843, this paper argues that there was a strong contemporary awareness of this dynamism. Both The Penny Magazine and the ILN embraced the idea of preserving knowledge by themselves becoming part of the process of preservation, in a conscious effort to become objects of reference and of the historical record. In contrast to the notion that such publications were largely ephemeral products of the Victorian publishing world, it is suggested in this paper that The Penny Magazine and the ILN contributed to, and reflected the desire to see, knowledge popularly preserved and referenced as well as popularly disseminated, and that they had a substantial and significant degree of success in their editorial efforts.

In this paper it is observed that an orientation towards the library user is occurring within the field of library history. As reading is an important aspect of library use, it is suggested that library history would benefit from using approaches and perspectives developed by historians of reading. These approaches could be used to support the growing interest in the library user. A concept of 'reading rules' is applied to a source material consisting of retrospective interviews containing information on children's reading practices within the context of the family in early twentieth-century Sweden. It is thereby demonstrated that parents applied different rules to their children's reading, and that these rules conditioned the children's reading and library practices.

The article presents systematically summarized findings on the origin and development of research on the history of the book in Lithuania by defining the most important stages and by identifying significant authors and their works, and disclosing how they perceived the content of the history of the book. Specific cases from Lithuania are used to illustrate some peculiarities that characterize the development of the history of the book in Eastern Europe during the last two hundred years.