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  • A Tribute to Roy Wolper, Editor Extraordinaire

After close to half a century of editing The Scriblerian, Roy S. Wolper has decided it is time to retire, a second retirement since he became an emeritus professor of English literature at Temple University in 2001, after a long and fulfilling teaching career. One of The Scriblerian's founding editors (with Peter A. Tasch and Arthur J. Weitzman), Roy saw the journal expand from its first issue of thirty-six pages to its most recent double issue in 2016 of 228 pages. As the profession evolved during the half century, so did The Scriblerian under his extraordinarily careful and conscientious direction. If the early issues contained primarily reviews of critical commentary on Dryden, Pope, and Swift, the dramatists, and the Kit-Cats, it is no accident that the latest issue contains almost an equal number of article reviews (from a dozen to twenty) on Dryden, Pope, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, and Swift. The novelists' inclusion was the result of an editorial decision in the early years of the journal to expand its pages to reviews of their writings as well as those of Scriblerian authors; Behn's inclusion (thirty-one essays on her alone were reviewed in the Spring 2014 issue, another sixteen in the 2015–2016 double issue), reflects Roy's steadfast policy of having the journal reflect all the trends of the scholarly community rather than choosing content from among them. For this reason alone, one can turn to The Scriblerian as perhaps the best archival record of where the profession has been since 1968, where it is today, and where it is heading, a record not only of whom we are discussing, but how and why—no critical approach has ever been barred, no essay or book excluded from coverage once brought to The Scriblerian's attention.

Valuable as this breadth and openness has been to eighteenth-century studies, Roy's true value has been as an editor to the 1,000 or more scholars who have contributed to the journal in the last forty-eight years. The sweep has been mind-boggling: staff reviewers from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and a half-dozen other countries as well, external article reviewers when the topic was too specialized for our staff, contributors of short notes and essays, and some twenty to thirty book reviewers in each biannual issue. Each and every one of these contributors will attest to one abiding experience in their dealings with The Scriblerian: never has their work been so carefully and precisely edited, never have they been urged so valiantly to prize conciseness and readability over all the other desiderata of composition. A few departed in anger after experiencing Roy's blue [End Page 1] pencil, but may well have been better for the experience; most were grateful, happy to have contributed to a journal that valued good writing and strong assessment in reviews—so much more desirable and useful to our readers than the laudatory and obscurantist blurbs that book reviewing has too often become. Roy has truly been a guardian at the gates.

Though Roy could be merciless with copy, he was (and remains) a delight in conversation, attuned to the personal lives of editors and reviewers, a cordial and knowledgeable colleague. Many of us have spent an hour or more on the phone with Roy, discussing family first, then the Phillies or politics, and finally, whether a sentence could be saved by reversing the order of the clauses, changing a colon to a semi-colon, or, if beyond rescue, just deleting it altogether, thus incurring the wrath of the author—Roy always opted to weather authorial anger rather than tolerate a poorly written sentence.

The present editors, many of us under Roy's tutelage for a good number of years, will strive to maintain The Scriblerian at the very high level he expected and produced. It will not be easy. Roy's personal touch will be sorely missed, his correspondence with our subscribers, advertisers, and contributors next to impossible to maintain, and his love of the handwritten note difficult to emulate. Nonetheless, we will strive to continue reviewing scholarship...

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