Volume 49 marks the beginning of a new era for African Arts. Since the journal’s inception in 1967 as “a quarterly magazine devoted to the graphic, plastic, performing, and literary arts of Africa, traditional and contemporary,” it has been produced out of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA by an editorial board composed of scholars affiliated with the university’s academic departments and museums. A consulting editor board of international scholars has contributed their time and energies in advising the editors and assisting with peer review, but for nearly half a century, African Arts has been primarily a UCLA production. This situation arose almost incidentally. Unlike many journals, African Arts is not the organ of a scholarly association, and association journals rotate their editorship on a regular basis, first, as a reflection of their diverse membership and, second, as a way to distribute the costs of running an editorial office across the membership. Generally, the institution where the current editor resides kicks in with office space, release time for the editor, and at least a portion of the salary for support staff to manage the peer review process, while the association uses dues both to finance the layout, copy editing, printing, and shipping of the journal and to provide the journal as a perk for its members. African Arts was originally founded on a business model where operating expenses would be covered by advertising and subscription income, with a relatively small subvention from UCLA. There was thus not only no incentive to rotate the editorship, but there was, in effect, no-one to rotate it to. We are not affiliated with ACASA, ASA, or CAA, and whatever institutional support we got came from UCLA alone. The onset of the Electronic Age and concomitant convulsions in the publishing industry have made our original business model no longer viable—as constant readers will have noticed, advertising in the journal is virtually nonexistent today, and consists primarily of exchange ads, where we publicize a likeminded journal in exchange for them doing the same for us. The African art galleries now buy (continued on p. 4) ad space in magazines like Tribal Arts that are more narrowly focused on a readership of collectors and, even more, rely on the Internet to attract new customers. The readership and editorial focus of African Arts, in the meantime, has shifted from broad discussion aimed at not only academics, but also collectors and general interest readers—who were inspired by the social and political changes sweeping through Africa in the 1960s—to the work and interests of postmodern academics and curators. While this has arguably made the journal more intellectually adventurous, there is still the small matter of paying the bills to produce it.