Editor's Note

Editor's Note The bulkiness of this issue of the Review is the result of a decision to adjust our publishing calendar and begin the next volume, and each volume thereafter, with the winter rather than the spring issue. Winter issues have had a way of not appearing until after January first anyway, and since most of the season itself occurs after that date, it seemed a reasonable way to tidy the schedule. We have therefore combined what would have been the winter 1975 issue with the autumn 1975 one, trusting to make up for publishing only three issues this year by making one of them a double issue. The next issue will be Volume 30, Number 1, Winter 1976. The foregoing presupposes that there will continue to be a Review, and that it will continue to appear four times a year. There probably will be, and it probably will, but it's as well to mention why there should be any hesitation in saying so at all. During the time the Executive Board was deliberating a change of name for the Bulletin one of the favored names was "Rocky Mountain Quarterly." This was discarded after Dolores Brown, then a member of the Board, asked how we should reconcile "Quarterly" with the hypothetical embarrassment of a lean year in which finances would not permit four issues of the journal. This embarrassment remains a chronic possibility. Since the Review is supported entirely by membership dues, and since membership fluctuates drastically from one season to the next, we have no stable budget to project our year's operation against. To put that in concrete terms: as of this writing there is enough money in the RMMLA account to cover the cost of this issue; there is not enough to cover the cost of the next one. Assuming that the raise in dues does not discourage renewals we should be all right, and in fact we have begun work on the next issue serene in the belief that the coffers will magically fill in the meantime, because so far they always have. Still, though memberships have increased in the last year, so have costs, and readers of the Review should be informed that if the second catches up with the first at some time in the problematical future, the result will have to be a cut in the number ofissues a given year will see. If this seems an abject plea for new memberships and renewals of old ones, it is something very much like that. Insolvency is an unpleasant specter, especially when it interferes with scholarship. Whether there should be an RMMLA, and if so whether it needs a journal of its own, are both questions raised periodically in English and foreign language departments, and the possibility of a negative consensus is provided for in a dissolution clause in the constitution. So far the prospects are bright, but they could be much brighter and still not threaten the specter. Both the editor and the executive director, then, would like to urge existing members to urge their colleagues to join, badger their libraries to subscribe , and of course continue their own support. One member of the Board suggested a few years ago, not entirely facetiously, that the journal might be published only once every two years as a way of saving money. Only two responses are possible to such a proposal; the other one is nervous laughter. ...