This issue of Choice contains our most eagerly awaited feature, the Outstanding Academic Titles list. This year’s list, Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011, includes 629 print and electronic titles selected by the Choice editors from among the 7,264 titles reviewed by Choice during calendar 2011. Comprising less than 9 percent of the titles reviewed during 2011 and 2.5 percent of those submitted during that same time span, these exceptional titles are truly the “best of the best.”

The Outstanding Academic Titles list is a long-standing tradition at Choice. The 2011 list is the 48th iteration in a series dating back to April 1965, when we published our first such feature, Outstanding Books of the Year. That inaugural list included 297 titles selected from among the 3,397 books reviewed by the magazine in its first volume year (March 1964 through February 1965). There is no indication in the magazine proper that the editors intended for this to become an annual event, but that is precisely what happened.

There have, however, been some changes over the years, including the name. From Outstanding Books of the Year, the name was quickly shortened to Outstanding Academic Books effective with the feature’s second appearance in May 1966. This was the appellation under which it appeared until May 1980, when the publication year of the titles making up the pool from which the list was selected was first appended. Then in January 2001 came the replacement of the word “books” by “titles” to accommodate the inclusion of electronic resources, resulting in the first ever OAT list, Outstanding Academic Titles, 2000.

Since 1993, the list has appeared in the January issue of Choice, but this too has been subject to change. As noted above, the first “Outstanding” feature appeared in the April 1965 issue. Thereafter, however, it appeared in May, the schedule maintained until 1993 when it was moved to January to improve its “timeliness.”

For someone of a certain age, a tour of those early “Outstanding” lists is a walk down memory lane, and a vivid reminder of the dramatic changes that have taken place in scholarly publishing during Choice’s nearly fifty years of existence. Among the titles included in that first “outstanding” list, for example, were Markings, by Dag Hammarskjöld, Herzog, by Saul Bellow, and Gideon’s Trumpet, by the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent Anthony Lewis.

And then there are the ghosts of publishing past, the once familiar names associated with lively, independent houses now either relegated to the dustbin of publishing history or surviving solely as imprints of much larger firms, e.g., Aldine, the Ronald Press Company, E. P. Dutton, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Thomas Y. Crowell … and the beat goes on.

The Outstanding Academic Titles feature has seen its share of change over the years. But our basic goal in compiling it remains simply to share with you, dear reader, our own carefully selected list of the very best titles to come across our desks over the past year. And along with that, we hope, some of the joy that comes from discovering an inspiring group of truly outstanding titles.