acknowledgements
If you are going to borrow Ira Clark's Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome at the Senate House, please turn to the Acknowledgements page:
'I owe general thanks, perhaps too often silent, to scholarly interpreters of history and literature, who will appreciate my society of books. I owe particular thanks to social scientists, undoubtedly some unidentified, who may wonder at my apparently nonsocial, impractical applications of their disciplines to a society of texts. Both groups will understand my thanks to critics who took the time and effort to make this a better work than it would have been; they should not be held accomplices to its waywardness...'
'All these scholars will share my special thanks to...'
'I thank future scholars. They will venture, I hope, to redress the inescapable abstraction of scholarly criticism which I have compounded into overgeneralisation because of current lacks...'
Blah, blah, blah. Enough of this 'scholarly bull'; someone already jotted down in pencil on the margin, 'This is a horrible, self-satisfied dedicatory/acknowledgements page'. Hehe.