Welcome from Ferdinand Mount, Editor, Times Literary Supplement
	'The TLS and its Contributors' by Deborah McVea and Jeremy Treglown, Editors, TLS Contributor Index
	'The TLS and Primary Source Media' by Mark Holland, Publisher, Primary Source Media
	The TLS Archive at News International Record Office
	Acknowledgements

The Times Literary Supplement  and its Contributors

The back numbers of The Times Literary Supplement are among the prime sources of twentieth-century British cultural history but two main obstacles have deterred anyone who wanted to make use of them. One is bulk: the text of the now more than 5,000 weekly issues runs to about 250 million words. The other, anonymity. For the first seventy-two years of the journal’s existence up to 1974, contributions were almost always published without their authors’ names.

With the electronic publication of the TLS Centenary Archive, both barriers have been removed. Subscribers can access any page simply through the on-line version of the published index: by a book’s title or author, or under listed subject-headings. And for the first time they can learn who wrote the reviews: not only their names but something about who they were, what else they did and the full range of what they wrote for the journal.

The back numbers tell their own story but for the majority of readers who would prefer a shorter narrative, a history of the TLS is being written by Derwent May, to be published in time for the paper’s centenary in 2002. Meanwhile, a short account of the background to each period appears in the following sections, along with a description of our sources and working procedures, and lists of acknowledgements and of abbreviations used.

Any comments on, or additional information for, the index of contributors should be sent to Dr Deborah McVea and Professor Jeremy Treglown, TLS Centenary Archive, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK, email enscc@warwick.ac.uk; or c/o the publishers, Gale Group, PO Box 45, Reading RG1 8HF, UK.