What Are Your Favorite Prefaces?

[David]

What are your favorite prefaces? The following preface is one of my absolute favorites -- a moving tribute from one brother to another in both a personal & a professional context. Such elegant writing, such magnificent style, & such expressive facility.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

TO THE MEMORY OF MY BROTHER

FRANCIS GEORGE FOWLER, M.A. CANTAB.

WHO SHARED WITH ME THE PLANNING OF THIS BOOK,
BUT DID NOT LIVE TO SHARE THE WRITING.

I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truths multiplied. He had a nimbler wit, a better sense of proportion, and a more open mind, than his twelve-year-older partner; and it is matter of regret that we had not, at a certain point, arranged our undertakings otherwise than we did.

In 1911 we started work simultaneously on the Pocket Oxford Dictionary and this book; living close together, we could, and did, compare notes; but each was to get one book into shape by writing its first quarter or half; and so much only had been done before the war. The one in which, as the less mechanical, his ideas and contributions would have had much the greater value had been assigned, by ill chance, to me. In 1918 he died, aged 47, of tuberculosis contracted during service with the B.E.F. in 1915-16.

The present book accordingly contains none of his actual writing; but, having been designed in consultation with him, it is the last fruit of a partnership that began in 1903 with our translation of Lucian.

H. W. F.


-- Henry Watson Fowler, "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" (Oxford University Press)