Editorial Compiling and preparing Paradigm is always an interesting business. Sometimes the cupboard is nearly bare and I fret as I contemplate who to approach/bully into a submission. Sometimes it is overflowing and I quake at having to put back a paper that I had begged from somebody only a few months earlier. Generally, I approach the task with a sense of dread not merely at the thought of the work, but of the thought of the toes I will inevitably tread on as I abuse the conventions on footnotes, slash through the hard work of learned contributors, fail to enter all the things I should have, and ride roughshod over the sentiments of hard-working colleagues. For this issue though, my chemical (or alchemical?) efforts have had smooth passage and the ingredients have come neatly together into a rich and eclectic mix without much cajoling and personal and political jousting – although as I write I cannot know what sore bunions I may irritate and what angry missives may yet be forthcoming. Nancy P. O'Brien provides us with a comparative study of school book collections in New Zealand and the United States and takes us through a range of research collections whilst pointing out the organisational, managerial, and preservational issues along the way. Her account is detailed and useful and vividly reveals both the interest and problems involved. Chris Stray offers a detailed account of the gender rhymes from Benjamin Kennedy's Latin Primer as used in an opera and goes on to explore the claim that such rhymes were used to send coded homosexual messages! The link between Latin and homosexuality may have numerous forms of expression but I never thought of textbooks as being one of them! Hats off to Chris again. Sidney Brown takes an interesting and unusual route through the complex terrain of the use and abuse of history texts in mid/late-twentieth-century America. Using some famous songs by way of orientation, he takes us, in typical tongue-in-cheek style, through readers recollections of textbook experiences, state educational directives, and secondary literature commentary. It worked for me! Norman Graves has mined away at a really interesting nineteenth-century geography textbook. The bibliographical detail, the probing of pedagogical technologies, and the tackling of Moravian theology all provide a rich contribution to textbook study. Finally Miha Kovac and Mojca Kovac Sebart remind us of
the relevance and importance of our study. In a powerful analysis set against the awful and tragic backdrop of Yugoslavian history, they analyse the cultural shifts that brought about the social implosion resulting in so much horror, through an account of Yugoslavian textbook publishing. A rich feast of textbook study. It still totally baffles me why textbook study is so low in the sights of academics and why the powerful anti-textbook ideology is so strong when the analytical potential is so plain to see. I am, however, eager to receive more contributions and I do urge you to send in your pieces. I am sure there are interesting treatments existing on hard drives or left in a folder at the back of the filing cabinet, possibly half-written as they had to be put temporally aside under the pressure of some other demand, but are simmering away at the back of your mind just waiting to come to published fruition.
John Issitt
John Issitt