To call Hove library's little display an exhibition is to glamorise it unduly.

However, while Dr Potter entertainingly lambasts Hove's parochialism (Letters, September 17), it is worth remembering, as a background to Hove library's unwillingness, like certain small towns elsewhere, to print the "n" word (use of which in Huckleberry Finn deprives countless youngsters in the US even today of acquaintance with a masterpiece of their literature), that, although Hove may be small town in certain ways, in one way it is more internationalist than Brighton - it has a French twin-town in Draveil.

I find Hove library's unwillingness to print this word rather quaint and am reminded of a French commissioner of police "who wanted to prosecute a contributor to Le Paris for a line of asterisks which he had deemed obscene" (quoted by Christopher Hawtree, friend of Hove library, in his edition of letters to the press by Grahame Greene).

Interestingly, a Greene letter in that edition points out that the Catholic Index, referred to by Dr Potter, was mainly concerned not, as most people suppose, with questions of obscenity but was intended to act as "a guide for the student by excluding...inexact expressions of Catholic belief".

Of course, some might feel such concerns are lost labour as all religions are inherently ridiculous.

-Dave Sandell, Brighton