In his Preface to "Poems of the Past and the Present" (1901), Thomas Hardy thanks "the editors and proprietors" of a long list of publications "for permission to reprint from their pages" poems they had previously published. At least in the United States, this is now a conventional statement for poets to include in their collections in an Acknowledgments section, but Hardy's version of it is the earliest that I have seen, and it makes me wonder about the history of such paratexts. His Preface then continues with a beautiful disclaimer that the book's poems might "possess little cohesion of thought or harmony of colouring. I do not greatly regret this." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 February 2026)