In my graduate school days at Yale in the early 1970’s, I dreamed of being part of a team that would produce an update and enlargement of Brugmann’s Grundriss, in which the individual living branches of Indo-European would be traced from their roots to the modern day. As the years went by, this seemed increasingly to be no more than an idle fantasy. Then in the summer of 2004, I received an email message from Matthias Fritz (engineered by Stephanie Jamison) asking me whether I would be interested in participating in his proposed De Gruyter Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics (not precisely the original title). I asked him what the book entailed, and he told me that there would be sections on every subgroup of Indo-European, including chapters on phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Seeing an unexpected opportunity to fulfill my youthful dream, I said that I would participate, provided that three additional chapters would be added in each case: on documentation, dialectology, and, for those subgroups that had an ulterior history (ie everything but Anatolian and Tocharian), on evolution. A chapter on dialectology of course needs no special defense, but one on documentation has become something of an obsession of mine. It is of course not terribly critical for Greek, but for every other subgroup (including Italic, as soon as one moves beyond Latin), the reader needs to know what the primary sources are and how to find them. Thus, those looking for somebody to blame for the long gestation period of this book should probably focus their wrath on me for having added 34 chapters (27.2%) to the book in one fell swoop.

Things did not, however, progress smoothly. I, for one, had at that point never engaged in editorial work and had no idea how to proceed; nor was it clear to me what my role was to be in the project. Years went by as the individual chapters of the book piled up in my office. In 2011, I received a notice from one of the authors saying that he wished to withdraw his contribution in order to publish it elsewhere. I saw then immediately that the entire project was about to unravel and proceeded to resign from my position. Very quickly I was contacted by Uri Tadmor of De Gruyter and urged not to resign; I was told that Brian Joseph would be brought on to assist me. By that time, I had indeed gained experience in editing; but it was not until June 30, 2012 that I seriously sat down to set things in motion for the production of this book. Ultimately, I was able to convince De Gruyter that I needed an additional in-house assistant, and Mark Wenthe, despite his very heavy teaching schedule, kindly agreed to assume this role. From the date just noted, I have put this project at the highest level of priority, working at it consistently and placing all my other long-term research projects on hold. Some chapters were dropped, 1 many chapters had to be reassigned to new authors, and