Welsh Journals

runs, these too are duly listed. Changes in the proportions of space devoted to advertisements are also noted, and reference is usefully made to the occasions when indexes of contents were issued. This kind of detailed information, where available, is provided for each of the titles listed. The text is enlivened by photographs of more than fifty title pages, which provide striking visual evidence of the diversity of typographical styles and the impressive and imaginative range of illustrations that were available to the early periodical publishers in Wales. A select bibliography of secondary sources and an excellent 'historical note' effectively locate the periodicals listed in the broader historiography of Wales, and indexes of editors, authors, publishers, printers and places of publication and printing render the bibliography an easily accessible one for researchers. The work of compiling this bibliography was started in 1979 as part of a two-year research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust at what was then known as the College of Librarianship, Wales. A second volume covering the period 1851 to 1900, drawing on material collected during the same project, is now promised. The publication of the first volume has brutally exposed the insufficiency of our knowledge of the periodicals of this later period, and the sequel is urgently required. But in the mean time, there can be no doubt that this invaluable, first-rate bibliography has set exacting new standards in the study of the periodical press in Wales. ALED JONES Aberystwyth NEWSPLAN. REPORT OF THE NEWSPLAN PROJECT IN WALES. By Beti Jones. Wales Regional Library System/The British Library, Aberystwyth. 1994. Pp. xi, 303. £ 30.00. The immensely useful NEWSPLAN project, which endeavours to locate, preserve and, where necessary, microfilm the local newspapers of the regions of the United Kingdom, has now extended its coverage to Wales. The NEWSPLAN Cymru/Wales project, funded jointly by the Wales Regional Library Service and the British Library, was undertaken principally in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. The scope and methodology of the work are clearly explained in an extensive, bilingual intro- duction to this welcome report. The remit of the research was to identify, locate and rationalize public access to more than a thousand Welsh newspapers published, in both Welsh and English languages, from 1804 to the present day. Beti Jones and her colleagues have discharged that responsibility in a most impressive way. But the value of this report to historians extends beyond its helpful recommendations to our nation's librarians to improve access to this voluminous but highly fragmented resource. By bringing this notoriously ephemeral and diverse print form for the first time under the most rigorous and comprehensive bibliographic control, it implicitly acknowledges the importance of the newspaper press as a cultural product. It will also enable historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to locate extant copies of even the most elusive titles, and to pin them down to precise publication dates and places of publication.