Casual

...A free book with a nicely proportioned inscription felt just right...

...As long as we are playing with Monopoly money, why not, I say, build hotels...

...and my advice of some conversation about dealing with an editor who had moved on to another publishing house—a common enough occurrence nowadays—while this book was in mid-composition...

...A dedication seems so much grander than a mere acknowledgment...

...This isn't a book, but I would nonetheless like to end here by making a different kind of acknowledgment: I was a jerk...

...As a careful reader of acknowledgments soon enough recognizes, writers, already a bit high from having recently finished a book, are here playing with Monopoly money— handing out lavish tips that finally cost them nothing...

...In my own books, I have always attempted to keep acknowledgments short and precise...

...I would rate it as roughly equivalent to my having won a good-conduct medal in the Army, which is given to everyone who has not been in a car accident or acquired a venereal disease...

...I have to add here that, while in the Army I had no car...

...My feeling was that if this other fellow had these qualities, I didn't want them...

...Nothing in the rules that says one has to know someone at all to put him or her in one's acknowledgments...

...I would also like to express my gratitude to the following," writes Mr...

...I must have been very convincing, for we haven't spoken since and that has to have been more than two years ago...

...on occasion, my name has appeared in a list with at least two other people I genuinely despised...

...But best, I think, never to acknowledge the help of one's wife, husband, or children, which, no matter how much any of them may actually have helped, is inevitably going to sound phony...

...I have been greatly aided in this by not incurring too much in the way of literary help...

...Acknowledgments can have other purposes...

...If I seem a little nutty on this subject, it is because I have a grudge against acknowledgments, having lost a friend through them...

...I have felt a certain sourness at being exaggeratedly acknowledged, or acknowledged as one among a select circle of creeps, but no acknowledgment quite got to me so much as one offered by a former graduate student who had become a friend...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...When the author next called, I told him how powerfully ticked his acknowledgment left me, and went on about it long enough to constitute telling him off...

...I'm currently reading a charming memoir, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, by John Richardson, that has as fine a roster of acknowledgments as I've seen in decades...

...Often I have been acknowledged for things I had no real hand in...

...I want to thank Bunny Wilson, Lizzie Hardwick, and Red Warren, even though none of them actually saw this book during its lengthy preparation, for providing useful models of the literary vocation at its highest power...

...Robert Silvers...

...I have been acknowledged in several books, and, sad to have to report to those who haven't been, as pleasures go, this one is minimal...

...If you can't dedicate a book to William Shawn, now long dead, the least an author can do is mention Bob Silvers in his acknowledgments...

...They can be useful as a depository for serious name-dropping, providing the hint that one knows famous people rather more intimately than one in reality does...

...Instead the book bears an inscription that states "Thanks very much for your help and good advice during the past couple of years...

...My help consisted of my reading and commenting on 30 or so pages of his manuscript...

...We were both credited, as I recall, with independence of mind and courageousness of thought...

...Casual NO ACKNOWLEDGMENT NEEDED Yesterday's mail brought a book from a friend—not a close friend, but someone I like a lot—and I was pleased to see that my name wasn't mentioned in his acknowledgments...

...This has caused me to imagine, with a deep shudder, my name showing up in the acknowledgments of a book by a skinhead: "For their help during a difficult phase in the composition of this book, the author wishes to thank Joseph Epstein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Hermann Goering...

...Richardson, and there follows a list of 48 names that speak to the widest—and toniest— intellectual and social connections...

...I do like to dedicate my books to family and friends...

...And, finally, to dear Sylvia, our pit bull, my thanks for not eating this manuscript, especially in its early stages...

...I owe you one, sweetie...

...When his dissertation, extensively rewritten as a book, arrived in my mailbox, I noted that both I and a man whose intellectual career I had come intensely to dislike were thanked in the exact same terms...

...Save the print...

...Hey, thanks, guys...

...I shall copy down here only 10 or so of the names that, for me, have the most zing, even though I don't know who all of them are: Sid and Mercedes Bass, Bill Blass, David Douglas Duncan, Maxime la Falaise, Lucien Freud, James Lord, Sonny Mehta, Claude Picasso, Annette de la Renta, and (voden...