From the earliest days of the existence of ONE, Inc., there has been a conscientious effort made to keep informed on what is going on in the rest of the world. ONE's library contains many, many volumes in foreign languages as well as language dictionaries, foreign directories, atlases and so forth. ONE subscribes to, or receives copies of every known homophile publication in the world. But, alas, what happens? Copies arrive, are passed around, looked over briefly; eventually, perhaps, they are bound, and then take their places on the library's already groaning shelves, where they will be available if and when someone can make use of them. Almost every day letters arrive from abroad, written in the language of their writers. Some few can be read and answered; others go into the files to wait the day when someone might join our staff or visit us who can read and answer them for us.

For the work that is done here at ONE both in the course of every day operations as well as for the work necessary to carry on ONE Institute we need to know (and should know) every modern language; we need a really profound knowledge of Latin, Greek, Sanscrit and Hebrew -even Egyptian hieroglyphics.

It is not that we are entirely helpless; there are those of us who do have a reading knowledge of French, or German, or Spanish-enough, at least, to enable us to recognize that we should know more.

But between a reading knowledge (or even a thorough knowledge) of a language and being able to make foreign materials available to our readers there lie the hours and hours of painstaking, tedious and laborious work of translation.

In the last few months, as the result of a series of fortunate but undependable situations, we have had available to us an unusual number of reviews of foreign publications and translations of foreign materials. There are more to come including some lengthy and highly significant studies which will be published in the Quarterly. At the moment we are sufficiently encouraged and optimistic to hope that we might be able to include something of foreign origin (if only news items) in all future issues.

To this end we should like to appeal to our readers for assistance. Those of you who live abroad or travel please write us about any interesting situation you encounter or any interesting information you may gather. (Please don't write us about the blond Viking, who was really a Greek god, you met in Copenhagen, or the adorable Italian, who spoke not a word of English but who was so sweet, whom you met in the Piazza di San Marco after all, everyone has his own story of this kind.) Those of you who read, please send us reviews, abstracts, news items, translations, or the books, articles or news clippings themselves.

With the help of all of you perhaps we can make ONE not only more interesting to our foreign readers but to our American readers as well and, in so doing, make ONE a spokesman for the worldwide community to which we all belong.

Marcel Martin Associate Editor

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