* * * * I hope I may be forgiven
for expressing a little personal interest in a judgement of some importance given by Mr. Justice Wynn Parry last week, because it seems to decide that I am for ever and indefeasibly Janus, carrying my name (like the snail its home) with me wherever I go, whether to the Brewers' Journal or the Greyhound Express or the Latter Day Saints' Millennial Sun or whoever else offers me sufficiently attractive terms, leaving my successe,r in this column to devise what substitutionary pseudonym he may. All this arises out of a case in which a lady who wrote in the Sunday Times under the name of Mary Delane cdiscontinued doing so, and the paper claimed the right to publish articles of another authorship under the same pen-name. The Sunday Times claimed that it was an implied term of its contract with " Mary Delane " that if and when she ceased to write for it she should leave her name behind her. The learned Judge found no evidence of such implication. Strictly speaking, no doubt, the decision depends on the construction to be placed on a particular contract. The pseudonym Atticus, also in the Sunday Times, has certainly covered more than one pen. If a paper asks a writer to contribute a regular feature, itself providing a pseu- donym, the case is no doubt different from that of Mary Delane.
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