The elusive nature and the rapid expansion of the total literature relating to African countries call for guides which can save time in the search for information. The following is designed as a contribution in relation to Lesotho. It also provides an example of the diversity of publication sources for materials on a single country. Some of the more recent items included may one day (in more detailed annotated form) become a supplement to earlier bibliographic work, part of which was published (Willet & Ambrose, 1980) as Lesotho: a comprehensive bibliography. Approximately 300 of the 2562 entries in this book (compilation completed in 1977, but published only three years later) are concerned with science and technology. There is now, however, more than enough additional material to produce a second volume as large as the original 550-page book.

ARD would like to join the many other Africanist sources in regretting the death at 54 of Professor Michael Crowder, at a time when he might have expected to be at the height of his intellectual and scholarly powers. None of those present will have forgotten his impassioned address as the featured speaker at SCOLMA's Annual General Meeting in 1986 when he mourned the lack of books in African libraries (published in ARD 41, 1986, 1-6 as ‘The book crisis: Africa's other famine’) and was accorded immediate and vigorous applause at the end of his speech. During his life he held academic posts at Columbia, Berkeley, Ibadan, Ife, Ahmadu Bello, Zaria, Lagos, and Botswana. In 1985 he returned to England and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in the University of London, where among many other activities he was appointed General Editor of the new project for publishing documents on the decolonisation of Empire.