Like so many other things, this book was conceived while lying in bed. I had just finished writing a statistically oriented commentary on opossum sex ratios and it wasn't the first time I had felt the need for such methodological comments, but usually these had been confined to referee's reports and unpublished correspondence. It would be useful, I thought, if a collection of such comments, and much more, was compiled. The book that sprang to mind would cover not only analytical methods, but also modelling and empirical techniques for sex ratio research, and its applications, and would cover all taxa from micro-organisms to mammoths (actually, mammoths are only mentioned here but see Chapters 9 and 15 for micro-organisms). Further, methodology would be presented very much in a theoretical context, there being no reason to break with the long and excellent tradition of close exchange between theoretical and empirical sex ratio research. Inevitably, discussion of some issues could be quite practical (‘hands on’) while other issues would require a greater emphasis on concepts (‘minds on’). Realizing what was needed, I immediately discounted the idea of writing the whole book myself. No individual could possibly have both the depth of knowledge and breadth of experience required to cover all of this adequately: it would have to be a multi-author edited volume.

The common belief that editing a multi-authored book takes just as much time and effort as simply writing the whole oneself (if that were possible) is probably an underestimate.