Throwing caution to the wind

IS anyone else surprised how health and safety has been allowed to win the war over common sense? In your article about the Bodleian (March 29), it’s easy to see that the shelves up in the balcony area have empty spaces. A few years ago, I joined a group on a tour of the building and I asked our charming guide about the empty shelves. She told me with a wry smile that the health-and-safety department had insisted that having books to the end was a potential danger. I asked if anyone had ever, in several hundred years, fallen off the balcony reaching for a book—not as far as she knew. Do we need this kind of nonsense? Margaret Flory, Isle of Wight