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