Welsh Journals

order to proceed, on a fixed budget and one to be confirmed yearly, to appoint a publishing agency. After a very competitive, and so highly gratifying, set of interviews we asked Parthian Books to begin the 'Library of Wales'. My role, now as Series Editor, largely centres on the overall choosing and format of the books, on reading proofs and on the commission and discussion of all the forewords for a series definitely intended to have as wide an appeal as possible. Parthian will undertake the tasks of publication and marketing. The Welsh Books Council through its English-language Publishing Grants Panel will be the accounting body to the Minister and proffer its own professional advice. But, ultimately, the public, now and in the future will be the judge of its success, both as a commercial and a civic project. For there is the rub with which, back in 1968, I at least, began. I read We Live and then Cwmardy because I was driven to do so intellectually and for my research work as an historian. I read them, though, with the fascinated delight, and sometimes disdain, that you feel when you see your own features in the photographs of your forbears. And that was, and is, far and away the most important reason for a Library of Wales in the 21st century. My paramount task will be to find a way of making our new Literary Album as broad and as deep as can possibly be. We will not all share the same tastes or even agree about the same qualities but I hope there will be recognition that different tones will be struck as the series proceeds to fulfil its remit. As an English-language series there will, inevitably, be heavy clangour from the industrial and urban south of Wales whose voices, since the 1930s, were so resonant. But a 'Library ofWales' without the subtle inflection of Emyr Humphreys (b. 1919) would be, for me, unthinkable. To him I would hasten to add the work of Wales's most distinguished 20th century thinker, Raymond Williams (1921-88) whose superb first novel Border Country (1960) will sit alongside Ron Berry and the novellas, Oscar and the Dark Philosophers, by that sardonic genius Gwyn Thomas (1913-81). The power, and the no longer neglected influence, of women's writers like Hilda Vaughan (1892-1985),