As my colleagues and I who constitute the MLA Committee on Bibliography complete our work on the Bibliography for 1970, we approach a significant milestone in the history and development of the MLA bibliographical system. The appearance in print in the summer of 1971 of the bibliography we have just compiled will mark the 50th year of publication of this annual service to scholarship in the modern languages and literatures.

Ernest Hemingway said it:—“A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts. ... A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures forever.” But works of literature endure in printed texts that become cumulatively corrupt. The definitive editions of the Center for Editions of American Authors restore and preserve the purity of the author's work.

Within the last few years librarians and scholars have become aware of a number of related facts about library collections and their growth and use that indicate that changes in library economy, in the old-fashioned sense of that term, are required if libraries are to meet their obligations.