It is a shock to hear that the Institute of Alcohol Studies plans to disperse the important historical library of the United Kingdom Alliance. When I first worked in this library it was crammed into a tiny room dominated by a duplicating room and consisted mostly of the Alliance miniute books. The then executive secretary proudly told me at that time that he had thrown out most of the mass of books and pamhlets which had existed when he took over. Since then the Alliance has built of a considerable historical library. For instance it acquired the only complete set of the annual reports of the temperance organization upon whose history I have spent much of my life, the Grand Lodge of England, Good Templars. From aged temperance advocates, the library also acquired innumerable temperance books and pamphlets unrelated to the UKA. If the Institute of Alcohol Studies lacks room for this library I hope then that it can go intact to a library that will make it available to researchers. PS: I still recall another painful moment in my career. At the end of a summer in London I made a brief visit to an organization of licensed victuallers (publicans) and saw among other things a complete run of its "office books" from the 1830s which contained copies of everything that the organization had produced in multiple copies. Perhaps it was low grade ore for the historian but it contained gold. The next time I was back in England the organization had moved to smaller quarters and the "office books" no longer existed.