The editors would like to thank at least a few among the many people who made this book possible. First of all， although one of us had been toying with the idea for this volume for a long time， it was the chance to organize a conference panel on multimodal discourse at the 9th conference of the International Pragmatics Association （Riva del Garda 2005）， that really got things going. In Jef Verschueren and Ann Verhaert we want to thank IPrA for this opportunity. Anke Beck， at Mouton， was enthusiastic about the book project well before it deserved that name： she actually invited us to submit a book proposal when we had scarcely even sent out the call for papers for the conference panel. We thank her for her trust， and Birgit Sievert and Monika Wendland for guiding us through many practicalities at Mouton during later stages. We are also indebted to Gitte Kristiansen， managing editor of the Applications of Cognitive Linguistics series， and to Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza， a staunch promoter of the book from its earliest beginning. Most of all we are grateful， of course， to our authors， who graciously responded to our critical comments on chapter drafts， and our requests for further revisions and fine-tuning.
　　Charles Forceville： I furthermore want to acknowledge how much I benefited from the interactions with the many students who， over the past ten years， followed my course on pictorial and multimodal metaphor in the Media Studies department at the Universiteit van Amsterdam， and from the fine papers they wrote. It is a source of pleasure and pride for me to have two of these former students as authors in this volume. I also want to express my appreciation for the academic associations that， despite their strong orientation toward verbal discourse， provided me with a platform to talk about metaphor in advertising， comics， and film： the International Cognitivist Linguistics Association （ICLA）， the Researching and Applying Metaphor （RaAM） association， and the Poetics and Linguistics Association （PALA）. It is one of the privileges of being a scholar that one has the opportunity to attend international conferences， where shared professional interests often lead to warm personal contacts. I have good memories of many such conferences. Among the numerous colleagues that have inspired me， I will mention one person by name. Ray Gibbs has always been exceptionally generous to me with his time， encouragement， and expertise.