Norman Dwight Harris, patron of the Journal of Asian Studies, after an illness of several months, passed away on September 4, 1958, in his home in Daytona Beach, Florida. Professor Harris was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 25, 1870. In 1892, he graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University. After studying a year in the University of Chicago, he spent three years at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig. In 1901, he received his degree of doctor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. For the next four years, he served as instructor in history in Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wisconsin. In 1906, he was appointed Professor of European Diplomatic History in Northwestern University. Ten years later, he oragnized the Department of Political Science at Northwestern, and remained chairman of this department until his retirement in 1928.

Until the latter half of the nineteenth century no separate department of Oriental books or manuscripts existed in the British Museum. Such works as had been acquired in the foundation collections of the Museum, the Old Royal, Sloane, Harleian, and Cottonian Collections, and those acquired subsequently by donation and purchase, were comparatively few in number and were administered by the two departments of Printed Books and of Manuscripts. By 1867, however, the growing number of acquisitions and a growing sense of the importance of the Oriental manuscript collections led the Trustees to set up a separate Department of Oriental Manuscripts. Printed books continued to be housed and administered along with the Western collections, and it was not until 1891 that a new Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts was formed, incorporating all the Oriental material under one Keeper, Sir Robert K. Douglas.