My Favourite Academic Acknowledgments

The acknowledgments section of academic books fascinate me. In older publications, they tend to be quite formal, thanking the author's colleagues and friends with titles and full names as though they had never met. More recent books will name a long list of scholarly influences, colleagues past and present, and occasionally even librarians or editors. The final few sentences thank the friends, spouses, lovers, and children who pulled the book across the finish line to publication. Acknowledgments can be heartfelt, goofy, or stilted, but I always enjoy getting a small glimpse of the author as a person before I begin to read their work. 

Here is my favourite.

After ruefully observing the 'academic name-dropping' that passes for personal acknowledgments in academic books, Hanneke Wilson concludes the acknowledgments to Wine and Words in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages with this:

...among those is Nimrod, our large ginger tom, because his demands for lap-cat therapy have been a distraction at times; the ideal academic cat fits neatly between lap and desk.

"Orange cat on the wall" by Tambako the Jaguar is licensed underCC BY-ND 2.0