Brash indeed is the outsider who ventures to talk to the members of a profession about their professional work. I would never have had the presumption, even after your persuasive Secretary's urgings, had I not thought that perhaps my own problems bore some relation to yours. I order books for a library, and try to order them selectively, buying only what seem to me to be the good books, valuable today and valuable tomorrow. Books written by members of this Association are among those to which, almost daily, I must give some scrutiny, and over the years I have reached this paradoxical conclusion: That while literary scholars in the United States are the most literate of the followers of humanistic disciplines, they produce more bad books than do their colleagues in other fields. They are more literate because they are more widely read, are more civilized, and in general, if not many of them write really well, they write better than, say, most of the people in my own profession of history.