The Journal of the History of Collections is dedicated to the investigation and documentation of all aspects of collecting activity. Its interests range as far back as the earliest Renaissance cabinets and beyond – both medieval and Roman period collections have received attention in the past. No limit is set on more recent practice, so that essays on later twentieth-century collectors have featured regularly. The range of subject-matter treated in the Journal is equally catholic: the earliest universal collections and those that came to engage with more specialized subject areas receive equal attention. Indeed, it is a fundamental tenet of editorial policy that papers in whatever specialized discipline should be presented in a manner that renders them accessible to the whole readership – widespread in terms both of geography and of subject interest – and are not addressed to a single community. From its inception the Journal has sought to provide a platform from which researchers can speak to each other across disciplinary boundaries: it is well known that the mechanisms of collecting and classification developed in natural history, for example, came to influence practices amongst collectors and curators in the fine arts and in ethnography, hence every opportunity is taken here to illustrate and to illuminate the common ground that exists between all those whose researches were founded on material collections. More theoretically oriented papers on the history and theory of museums and museum practice are likely to be better placed elsewhere.