O M "Skip" Brack, Jr.,74, died on November 8, 2012. He was called “Skipper” by his parents to differentiate him from his father who was also named OM (pronounced O, M, as though the letters were initials), and was known as “Skip” to his many friends and associates in his adult years. To some of these friends and to all the other scholars who cited his work, the absence of periods in what appeared to be the initials of his name was an enduring puzzle. Skip’s work, however, was devoted to various kinds of clarification. He was a textual editor par excellence, skilled at comparing the extant states of a published work and deciding which printing should be followed in a definitive scholarly edition. He employed his skill in the construction of several of the most important editions of eighteenth-century writings published in the last fifty years. He was the founding editor responsible for the text in the Works of Tobias Smollett (1988-2013) and he prepared the text for volumes 11-13 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (2012) to name just two of his most important achievements. He was both textual editor and commentator in the publication of many other works. He was still at work on volumes 19 and 20 of the Yale Johnson at the time of his death, and had several other works in progress. After earning a B.A. at Baylor in 1960, he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation under William Todd, a great bibliographer, at the University of Texas, Austin. He taught at the University of Iowa from 1965-73 and directed the Iowa Center for Textual Studies most of that time. In 1973 he moved to ASU where he taught until his retirement in 2008. Skip is survived by his wife Cynthia Burns, a son, a grandson, a brother and nieces and nephews.