Acknowledgments

In 1971, while still a member of the Air Force Academy English Department, I was offered the opportunity to author “A Continuing Checklist of Shaviana,” then publishing as an installment three times a year in Stanley Weintraub’s The Shaw Review (SR). The invitation came through a then senior Academy English Department colleague, Colonel Michael Mendelsohn—himself a Shavian and a member of SR editorial board. Stan, as he did many others whom he invited to the society of Shaw studies, shepherded me and encouraged me as he continued to edit SR and then SHAW: The Annual, which debuted in 1981, wherein the “Checklist” continued to appear as an annual article. As the years followed, the length of the Checklist increased—from three and a half pages in eight-point font and three editorial sections to its iterations in 2012, 2013, and 2014 of as many as forty pages in eight subject sections. The single major enabling technological driver of this growth was the power of the Internet as a search engine. For me, it is closely followed by the indispensable research librarians at Central Michigan University, with special thanks to Aparna Zambari.

Continuing to be fabulously blessed in its editors, the SHAW eventually came into the care of Stan’s brilliant student, Professor Fred Crawford, who, after ten years (1989–1999) as editor, passed away suddenly and too soon. He was followed as SHAW editor by the extraordinary Professor Mary Ann Crawford, his wife. The latest editor of the SHAW, Michel Pharand, also brilliant, also one of Stan’s students, has had the greatest influence on these later years of the Checklist, enabling my choices to organize the burgeoning and variegating increase of its entries into its twenty-first-century format. No editor could be a faster, nor a more accurate, proofreader than Michel (the mistakes that got through were mine). No editor could have been more generously patient when the Checklist was late.

Also materially complicit, beyond the incomparable Stan, who has sent me Checklist nominations for my forty-two years of writing it, was Dick Dietrich, the principal inventor of the International Shaw Society (ISS) and master of the ISS website. More than any other in these recent decades, he calls the roll of all people who are interested in Shaw. He could have written much of the Checklist. Next is the real Shaw bibliographer, Charles “Al” Carpenter, author of the axial bibliography of scholarly writing about Shaw, who has taken great care to share with me as soon as he could the newest found Shaw items of lasting scholarly importance—a number of which I should never have found on my own. His bibliography, usually updated more than annually, is also available online to members on Dietrich’s ISS website. Al’s constant encouragement to me has been a great gift. Isidor Saslav’s generosity with his knowledge, his Shaw archive, and the happy energy of his encouragement were available to me almost to his last breath. John Bertolini offered timely compliments. Leonard Conolly’s “How can we help you [do the Checklist]?” from the floor of the Sarasota Shaw conference rings in my ear. Richard Winslow, another of Stan’s students, grown older with the rest of us, sent enough potential entries over the years that a byline for him as a special contributor to the Checklist was often warranted. Michael O’Hara, the sitting president of the ISS, continues the cordial support of the Checklist writer given by Dietrich and Conolly. William “Bill” Baker, the editor of Eliot-Lewis Studies (young GBS read George Eliot) and Year’s Work in English Studies, which carries a special Shaw paragraph, and author of several dozens of books, has been kind enough to write about his admiration of the Checklist. Others to thank are Al Turco, Sally Peters, Lagretta Lenker, Jean Reynolds, Ann Saddlemyer, Tony Gibbs, Julie Sparks, and Martin Meisel.

Finally, Jeanne Reese, a wife to me once, and always a very close friend, made protected time for me to work on the Checklist over the many years when our children were growing. She is also a razor...