This whimsical volume is a product of well over thirty years of activity. Beasts, Ballads, and Bouldingisms might be called a "significant frivolity." It comes out of a state of mind halfway between boredom and total absorption, where the mind floats free in the never-never land of half-realistic fantasy. Out of lectures, conferences, and above all committee meetings come these doodles in the shape of drawings or verses or both. They emerge out of that part of the mind where one stands as spectator. The beasts seem to have begun with the "Oc-toped'' drawn on a concert program from Ames, Iowa. The originals are on various scraps of paper and leaves from a looseleaf notebook. The longer ballads tend to come out of conferences, the shorter ones out of committees. The first came out of a two-day meeting on the Impact of the Union (about 1948) at the American University in Washington. The Bouldingisms consist of a stable of a rather different color. They have been collected from Boulding's writings and from recollections of speeches by Richard Beilock. The Bouldingisms come not out of doodling at meetings but out of "serious" writing, but the state of mind out of which they come is not perhaps radically different from that which produces the beasts and the ballads.