I am not so busy preening myself that I forget where credit is due: apart from thanking Adam Bohannon, Fairchild Books's art director, and Liz Marotta, the patient and perseverant production editor, I cannot sufficiently thank Sylvia Weber, a superb development editor, the midwife of this book, a friend of more than thirty years' standing, and a woman whose socks always match, if not the cat, then her earrings. Sylvia suggested this textbook to a great many acquiring editors in houses where she worked over the years. Fairchild's late and much missed Mary McGarry had the vision to see a niche market in the field of interior-design education. How I wish she had lived to see its lovely red cover!

Many a book project founders with the loss of its original acquiring editor, but Olga Kontzias, Fairchild's executive editor, backed Writing for Interior Design from the initial gleam in Sylvia's eye through the author's formal proposal through publication. Her patience must have been sorely tried when her author missed the original manuscript due date--though said author did turn in a book not only longer but fuller and richer than originally projected. . . .

And all this pleasure quite beside the central gratification of helping design students achieve fluency in a medium--writing--that many of them intensely distrust. I like designers, and I like to help them develop the verbal communication skills that will contribute to their success in their profession. I need to bear in mind, of course, that they do not necessarily attach to language the overriding importance that I do. Not incidentally, perhaps, this insight was forcefully borne in on me during my visit to Santa Fe as the guest of my oh-so-stylish publisher. To quote from the preface of Writing for Interior Design: