“As a genre, Festschriften, like other edited volumes, can lack the cohesiveness of biographies. At their worst, they can easily turn into miscellanies of unrelated chapters on widely differing topics, with no common theme and connected only by the accident of being authored by people who were once students or colleagues of the honouree. They are the Los Angeles of literary genres, with a few pleasant locales but no “there” there. Having co-edited two such works myself, I have every sympathy for editors trying to turn their assorted contributions into a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts.”