No project of this kind is feasible without a great deal of support. This one has had the advantage of the best kind of help: the informed encouragement of the people entrusted with the care of the extraordinary materials you will see in these pages. It is a real pleasure to express my deep and warm gratitude to all of them.

Tom Hickerson, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies and Special Collections in the Cornell University Library, greeted my initial proposal with just the kind of enthusiasm a scholar dreams of finding in an interlocutor. He worked out all the details of my appointment, and provided constant intellectual spurs to the project’s realization. As if that were not enough, he made Cornell and Ithaca my home away from home in the summer of 1999.

Katherine Regan provided my first serious tour of the holdings and saved me incalculable time by seeing instantly which intricacies of the collections’ organization I needed to know. My subsequent conversations with her never failed to expand my sense of the possibilities of what I was doing.

Colleagues in the Kroch Library always had (or made) time to talk with me; unfailingly helpful, they also knew how to point me in fruitful directions.

Finally, I am especially grateful to Jennifer Conklin. From a visual and technical standpoint, Jen has made the site all I imagined it could be. But of equal importance is how her passion for the subject itself and her imaginative investment in this strange and compelling material, have from the first made her the perfect partner in this venture.

John Anzalone
Skidmore College
January, 2000