The Editor's Department

THE EDITOR'S DEPARTMENT Michael B. Montgomery has sent the following correction to a book notice in Language 67/1: In the March 1991 issue oíLanguage (67: 188-89) appeared a review by Glenn G. Gilbert of the Annotated bibliography of Southern American English, coedited by James B. McMillan and me. Apparently believing the book to be my revision and expansion of an earlier volume with the same name, edited by McMillan and published in 1971, Professor Gilbert gave me sole credit for producing the book. However, Professor McMillan most assuredly deserves equal credit for any contribution the book makes to research in the field of Southern American English. I welcome this opportunity to supplement Gilbert's review and to clarify both McMillan's role in producing the book and the division of labor between us. The second edition was in fact initiated by McMillan, who asked me to collaborate with him in 1981. At no point in the many years of this project, which required the patient ferreting out of countless obscure items that perhaps only fellow bibliographers can identify with, did we not fully share the work. We conferred early on to lay down our principles for collecting and annotating, and we shared the proofing of the manuscript equally after eight years of teamwork . McMillan wrote a good number of the annotations for the second edition and he improved many of mine; I could not have done the work by myself. This may not surprise many readers (surely not those who know Jim McMillan at all), but for the record it needs to be said. A good bibliography requires not only countless hours but, more crucially, the attention to detail and handling of entries born of an intimate knowledge of the literature, all of which McMillan invested in the book. His reputation was already achieved by his seminal scholarship in lexicology, dialectology, place-name study, usage study, and phonetics—and by his administrative work, which often kept him out of the limelight (e.g., he spent nineteen years as managing editor of Publication of the American Dialect Society, and he was founder of the University of Alabama Press, which became one of the more prominent university presses for titles in linguistics). All of the talents exhibited and developed in these endeavors made Jim McMillan one extraordinary bibliographer. It was indeed a privilege to work with him. 667 ...