Book reviews in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior have come to have a special character. The nominal target of a review is used not primarily as an item for evaluation, but rather as a prompt for a reviewer's own discussion of issues that were, or that should have been, raised by that book. Most of the reviews were fostered by A. C. Catania in the inviting of reviews and in his editorial work on submitted manuscripts. During more recent years, P. N. Hineline has continued to nurture reviews, giving them enhanced salience, and has expanded scholarly discourse in the Journal by introducing treatments of major topics in which articles are accompanied by commentaries and author replies (cf. the format of the journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, after which such treatments are modeled).

This section consists mainly of editorials that illuminate the background of the collection of essays. One function of the editorials was to call attention to relevant books that had not been reviewed. (The Postscript near the end of this anthology serves a similar function.) Unfortunately, such surveys have only rarely been overtaken by subsequent reviews of books identified in this way (books by Marvin Harris noted in "Conceivable book reviews" being one exception). Some material also becomes obsolete with the appearance of new editions. For example, the editorial on etymologies and dictionaries, "Speaking of behavior," cites the deletion of the etymological appendix from The American Heritage Dictionary,but that appendix was revised and reinstated in its third edition (1992). Also, a new edition of Reber's The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology(1995), cited therein, has appeared. Nevertheless, the editorials fill in gaps that are inevitable in any such scholarly enterprise.

The very first JEAB book review, appropriately enough, was B. F. Skinner's descriptive paragraph about a book by Richelle. It is no accident that it appears on a left-hand page in this volume; it appeared in a like position when published in 1967. The journal's practice of starting all regular articles on a right-hand page meant that many ended with a blank even-numbered page, and it had long been policy to make good use of those spaces.

Most editorial activity involves selection, but occasionally editors can initiate. One opportunity for such initiative arose as a consequence of some browsing by Catania among old psychology books in a used-book shop. On the spine of one 25-cent book was the title, Greek Physiological Psychology(Stratton, 1917), and a passage on the first page opened to was reminiscent of some writing by B. F. Skinner. Excerpts from both Theophrastus and Skinner were eventually submitted to S. S. Pliskoff, who was JEAB Editor at that time, and in 1972 (Volume 17, page 158) they became the first of many quotations published in the journal (as a consequence, the first use of a JEAB quotation as a citation source was probably in Skinner, 1974, p. 81).

Victor G. Laties assumed responsibility for the quotations in 1973, when he succeeded Pliskoff as Editor, and continues to select from material sent in by journal editors, authors and readers, the sources ranging over more than two millennia, from classical Greek philosophy to contemporary newspaper articles. In this volume we maintain the practice of starting each main article on an odd-numbered page, and so have created the opportunity for reprinting a generous sample of (mostly) relevant quotations on the even-numbered pages thus made available. Laties' selections provide another illustration of how behavior analytic concepts illuminate a broad spectrum of intellectual issues. Some quotations, especially those from literature and the arts, reveal dimensions of relevance not likely to be addressed in reviews, which are typically concerned with more technical topics.