Introduction
We at the University of Virginia Press are pleased to present you with this overview of the publication process and to provide you with guidelines that will ease your manuscript's journey from manuscript (MS) to bound book.

"We" are, in fact, five departments, all of which work together constantly to ensure the timely and successful publication of your MS. Acquisitions is the department most authors encounter first: this department screens MSS and schedules readers' reports for draft MSS, championing your MS within the Press and to the Press's editorial board. In the MS Editorial Department, the managing editor schedules in-house or freelance editing on your final MS submitted to the Press; MS editors act as your in-house liaisons for the rest of the production process. The Production Department schedules design, composition, and printing of your book. While your MS is moving through these three departments, Marketing Department staff devise the best marketing strategies for your book, and Operations Department staff familiarize themselves with your book in preparation for orders and shipments.

A current staff listing is found at the University of Virginia Press's web site, where we also post Press news, submissions information, electronic publications, exhibits schedules, and seasonal catalogs, various forms, and other information of interest. We are adding to our web site all the time, so please visit our home page at http://www.upress.virginia.edu/.

The following pages address the questions most often asked by our authors as they prepare their manuscripts. The first four chapters deal with crucial aspects of MS preparation that must be attended to before you send your final MS to the Press. "Style and Usage" introduces you to Virginia style and alerts you to potential stylistic problems. "Permissions and Acknowledgments" helps you through the maze of permissions issues. "Mechanical and Electronic Preparation of Text" will help you prepare the hard copy MS and the MS disk to make the process as painless and the final disk as useable as possible. "Illustrations" gives important information to authors who wish to include art (tables, photographs, graphs, and maps) in their book. Examples in these chapters are printed in a nonproportional font (New Courier), but you will note that your MS should be fully double-spaced.

"From Manuscript to Bound Book" explains what happens to your MS, and what we will expect of you, once you and your acquisitions editor agree that you have sent to the Press the final version of your MS. This chapter provides an overview of the production phases. The "Marketing the Book" chapter explains how the Marketing Department works for you. The appendix contains sample documents and reproduces some of the forms you will receive as a University Press of Virginia author. Use "The Order of MS Elements" and the checklist on the back page as ready references.

Fuller discussions of some of these matters may be found in the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. If a particular point still puzzles you, please ask us how best to proceed.

Welcome to Virginia--we hope you will stay awhile.