Dedicated to the joy, and pain, of university teaching, this book sets out what we have learned from teaching sociology together for five years. It's a celebration of the rich rewards of collegiality, of the books and writers we love, of a passionate sociology's capacity to quicken our appreciation and pleasure in the art of life, of the students who have been our teachers.

One of the joys of university life is its potential for excessive generosity. Academic life can be a feast to which everyone contributes, whether or not they mean to, whether or not their gifts are used as they intended. Such a feast produces a magical economy where strict reciprocity is impossible and scarcity loses its threat, where teachers and students always get more back than they've given and sometimes more than they've bargained for.

We can therefore name only a few of those who've contributed to this book. Sal Renshaw commented on both our first and second drafts and we've benefited immeasurably from her detailed suggestions and her generous encouragement. Gay Hawkins, Annette Kuhn, Ian Lennie, Maddie Oliver and Anita Sibrits also made valuable suggestions on our drafts. Seminar audiences in Sydney, Adelaide and Lancaster commented on various working papers; we learned much about metaphor from a subject we taught with Jenny Lloyd; Leo and Max Sibrits have made a deep impact on several chapters; John Bern conducted the interview discussed in Ink. The editors of Work, Employment & Society have permitted republication of a few paragraphs from Andrew Metcalfe's article ‘The Curriculum Vitaé (1992: 619–41), and Scholastic kindly allowed us to quote Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline.

Our colleagues Michael Humphrey, Diana Olsberg and Gay Hawkins, and our Head of School Ann Daniel and Dean John Ingleson have our gratitude for creating a school environment [Page viii]where teaching and learning can be joyous and open.

As a way of appropriately acknowledging all the other people who've contributed to the feast that sustains us, we've done our best to write a generous book. There's a traditional storytellers' ending that appeals to us –

Take it, and may the next one who tells it better it.