No book about methodology is ever finished, really. But after 10 years of major developments in morphometrics, each published (or unpublished) as a separate article, it was time for a coherent overview. My “introductory lecture,” for which there was no text available, would take four hours at the podium. Students complained that my lecture notes, even when not handwritten, were unreadable. I was beginning to mislay some of the explanations of lovely patterns from the earliest examples, while other early work needed triage: Certain changes of position were so blatant as to be embarrassing. And I had grown weary of the endless cross-referencing between papers: Bookstein (1989q) citing (1986x), (1987w, y, z), and (1990v, k, and forthcoming) – many of which cited each other incestuously as well.

Yes, it was time for a 10-year retrospective, if only to simplify the indexing. Yet the principal stimulus for the writing of this book was none of these general intellectual aches and urges, but instead a specific crisis. In 1987 the National Science Foundation instituted a series of workshops on morphometrics for systematic and evolutionary biology. The first took place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May 1988. Each instructor was to distribute a text in advance of his lecture.