ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The first person to suggest that some of these essays might be worth republication in more accessible form was the late baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, then in another line of work. My Berkeley colleagues Gene Brucker and Barbara Shapiro gave me further encouragement in this direction; the latter also brought the idea to the attention of James Clark, director of the University of California Press. To him I owe special gratitude for his confidence in a project about whose feasibility, however pleased I was by the thought of bringing these pieces together in a book, I had considerable misgivings. Werner Gundersheimer, director of the Folger Library, meanwhile gave me the best possible counsel about the presentation of the collection. My secretary, Vanessa Friedman, and my research assistant, Kathryn Edwards, helped to prepare the collection for the printer. My wife endured, over more than four decades, the abstractedness and other strains occasioned in their author by the initial composition of these pieces; she also gave sensitive and reliable stylistic help with the essays. I should like to express here my deep appreciate to all these persons.