Hurrah for second hand bookshops - no amount of internet can replace the sheer pleasure of browsing through stacks of dust covered books in forgotten backstreets of Britain’s towns and villages. It’s all very well having search engines and metadata (or not), which can search through digital content but there is still huge amounts of paper based content. How would a search engine find ‘Passed to You Please’ Britian’s Red-Tape Machine at War’ (no, not the current war, the 1939-1945 one). Well actually, good metadata would have helped with resource retrieval in this case, but there isn’t much use of good metadata on most of the web.

The book begins thus:

‘One afternoon in the summer of 1860 a sheet of paper was handed across the table to an official from the Treasurey. It was a letter, copied on a letter-press seventy four years previously, and still legible.
‘It was produced that afternoon because a Parliamentary Committee had discovered that every one of the 20,000 letters and memorandum printed every year by the Treasurey was written with pen and ink…at least two more were copied in pen and ink and retained’.

‘The Committee was shocked. It suggested that as letter-presses had been commonly used in private business for a century and had been in existence for two, they might now be safely introduced into his Majesty’s Treasury. And here, for the information of the Treasury, was a sample of letter-press work.

‘The Treasurey was not impressed. Treasury copyists, said the official, had always given satisfaction with their pen and ink. Many of them had been in the office, man and boy, for forty years. They knew the job and did it. They knew the way of the office and followed it. A change would be unfair to the copyists. It would be undignified. Anyway, it would not work.

‘So the Treasury stuck to its pens and encouraged other Government offices to stick to theirs. It did not give in to presses until 1885; and by that time, Remington’s had been selling their typewriters for at least twelve years’.

‘Every innovation in office procedure has struck the same Treasury negation. Telephones…when a telephone in the Treasury was first suggested, the Permanent Secretary said he could think of no circumstances in which he would not send a messenger or go himself rather than use such an instrument. Forced into a corner, the Treasury still insisted that the number of telephones allotted to it should be no more than four - one for the doorkeeper - and that other Government offices should have no more than one each for the whole building’.

What a joy of a book - and this is all only on the first page.

I’ve been in so many second hand bookshops lately that I can’t actually remember where I got this - it was possibly in either Norwich, Holt or Cambridge. There’s a list of second hand bookshops here

“Passed to You Please”
J.P.W.Mallalieu
London
Victor Gollancz Ltd
1942