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                     A FISH TRIES TO DANCE:
      ONE READER'S RESPONSE TO LIBRARIES' ADULT SERVICES--
            RESPONSE TO MARGARET E. MONROE'S LECTURE
            ADULT SERVICES: PREDICTION AND CONTROL
                                By
                           Ronald Gross
     Thank you. First, let me share with you the trepidation that I
have in being up here. Professor Monroe kindly sent me an early draft
of her speech so that I could begin thinking about my response as she
was working on it, and she wrote, "I intend to improve this consider-
ably before delivery, but I wanted to share this rough draft with you."
I read it and wrote back immediately, "If you improve that draft you
will topple me right off the platform before I even get my turn, so
please do not improve that draft any further." Well, she went right
ahead and improved it.
     On the other hand, I am compensated because I feel a kind of bond
to her and you, like the farmer about whom Ezra Pound tells a story in
the ABC of Reading. (13) Pound gave the farmer a copy of Emerson, came
back a month later, and asked him how he liked it. The farmer thought
for a minute and said, "That fellow has a lot of my ideas."
     My foreboding about coming here today was sharpened by the fact
that, over the past year or two, I have gone through the strange but
nice experience of being sort of handed from one librarian to another --
I am thinking of people like Kathleen Weibel, Jacquelyn Thresher, Linda
Crowe, and people in California and Iowa and Tennessee. All of them
used me for special occasions, and I began to notice that they all had
(13) Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press,
      1934.
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