The writing of this book has spanned a decade, and several continents. It was begun during the fall of 1982 at the Center for Study of Public Choice in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Lomasky was spending the year as a visiting fellow. It was finally completed during a fortnight's visit at the Australian National University in August 1991. The world may not have “eagerly awaited” the emergence of the book, but the authors certainly did.

The period of its gestation is partly a testament to the difficulties of trans-Pacific collaboration – particularly when one of the authors is a devotee of nineteenth-century technology. Collaboration for us, at least on this project, has required face-to-face contact: the opportunity to talk things through and the discipline of having one's door battered down by an irate colleague when drafts are overdue. We have become converts to the view that live theater has no satisfactory substitutes.

The delay is also partly attributable to difficulties in collaboration across disciplines. There has been no great difficulty in coming to a mind on the central argument of the book or on the more detailed aspects developed in the various chapters. Our problems have not been ones of communication with each other, but rather of communication with our various imagined audiences. Each of us has wanted in the writing, naturally enough, to address our respective disciplinary peer groups.