Relevance logics came of age with the one and only International
Conference on relevant logics in 1974. They did not however become
accepted, or easy to promulgate. In March 1981 we received most of the
typescript of IN MEMORIAM: ALAN ROSS ANDERSON Proceedings of the
International Conference of Relevant Logic from the original editors,
Kenneth W. Collier, Ann Gasper and Robert G. Wolf of Southern Illinois
University. 1 They had, most unfortunately, failed to find a publisher -
not, it appears, because of overall lack of merit of the essays, but
because of the expense of producing the collection, lack of
institutional subsidization, and doubts of publishers as to whether an
expensive collection of essays on such an esoteric, not to say deviant,
subject would sell. We thought that the collection of essays was still
(even after more than six years in the publishing trade limbo) well
worth publishing, that the subject would remain undeservedly esoteric in
North America while work on it could not find publishers (it is not so
esoteric in academic circles in Continental Europe, Latin America and
the Antipodes) and, quite important, that we could get the collection
published, and furthermore, by resorting to local means, published
comparatively cheaply. It is indeed no ordinary collection. It contains
work by pioneers of the main types of broadly relevant systems, and by
several of the most innovative non-classical logicians of the present
flourishing logical period. We have slowly re-edited and reorganised the
collection and made it camera-ready.
