The following text constitutes the foreword by LOIS ALETA FUNDIS (reference librarian, Mary H. Weir Public Library, West Virginia, USA) to ‘Stumpers! Answers to Hundreds of Questions that Stumped the Experts’, edited by Fred R. Shapiro, Random House, New York, 1998. The answers thematically presented in this paperback (pp. xviii + 236, ISBN 0-375-70174-5, $12.95) were provided by US librarians in their own Internet discussion group, Stumpers!, which was started in 1992 by Anne Freeney, a student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Rosary College (now Dominican University) in Illinois. Some wombats chanced to go along for the ride, and ET here honours them and their lexically and bibliographically gifted friends.