The Waste Land
SIR.—The obvious place for unwanted books is not, pace Mary Holland, the local hospital, but the local prison. A couple of years ago when I did a few days at Brixton, I took inside with me a copy of Moore's Principia Ethica, the sort of work for which prison provides a suitable degree of leisure and absence of distraction, one might suppose.
To my surprise this was taken away from me, on admission and when I demurred I was told the prison librarian would visit my cell in due course. He did so in my absence, whilst I was collecting my breakfast on a lower landing the following morning. He had kindly left me two books; the first was a learned dissertation on bee-keeping published during the latter part of the reign of her late Majesty Queen Victoria, whilst the second was a murder story. It was not a bad one at that and I have no reason to suppose that the absence of the final pages in which the solution to the mystery of the murderer's identity was presumably disclosed had anything to do with official policy beyond mere neglect.
JOHN PAPWOR EH
Rose Cottage, Elconthe, Stroud, Gloucestershire
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