Interest in Combinatorics continues to grow. For this, the thirteenth British Combinatorial Conference, our mailing list was almost worldwide and contained more than 950 names.

As usual, the British Combinatorial Committee has chosen nine Invited Speakers for the Conference each of whom has been requested to give a lecture of survey type at the Conference and also to prepare a paper for these Proceedings on the subject matter of their talk. Once again, the hoped-for result of a valuable collection of papers to act as a reference source over a wide spectrum of combinatorial topics has been achieved.

In order that this volume should be available for distribution to participants on the first day of the Conference, the usual tight schedule had to be adhered to. The Editor is therefore especially grateful to those who submitted their papers on time and to the referees who almost all carried out their task promptly as well as thoroughly. (At the time this Preface is being written, it is still not certain whether it will be possible to include all nine papers because one or two were either submitted in final form very late and/or were not refereed in time.)

The Rado lecture (which commemorates the late Richard Rado's contribution to British combinatorics) will, on this occasion, be that given by Z. Füredi.

Arrangements have been made for the contributed papers of the Conference to be published in a special issue of Discrete Mathematics and the organizers are grateful to D. R. Woodall for agreeing to act as guest editor for this purpose.