Recollections

" It may very well be that I am doing something now which is totally unnecessary, indeed that is a foregone conclusion as far as many omnivorous readers are concerned, for they never by any chance read a Preface or an Introduction. But only the other day I was reading an interesting volume of reminiscences, and the writer said that after the publisher had received the manuscript he wrote sternly demanding the reason why there was no Introduction. More, he said that one must be written forthwith, and it was so.

Now I cannot honestly say that I, like that writer whom I have quoted, am a novice at book writing, or have much to learn concerning the ways of publishers, since this book will make about the thirty-sixth that has been perpetrated by me during the last seventeen years. Too many, far too many, I know (this to forestall the obvious remark), but what I want to say is that in no case have I ever been asked for an Introduction, or questioned why I had written one. Follows inevitably the remark, ¿Why this one, then? Can¿t you let your book tell its own tale?¿"