Anthony Baldry was educated at Enfield Grammar School and Queens’ College, Cambridge and has worked in Italian Universities for over  35 years. He  is currently associate professor in English language and translation at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Pavia, Italy.  For many years he has been responsible for organising and participating in international collaborative research projects in the field of multimodality, multimediality, hypertext development and e-learning, concerns reflected in his editorship of Multimodality and Multimediality in the distance learning age a collection of twenty research articles together with an introduction are papers presented at international congresses at the University of Pavia between 1994 and 1999 which pioneered the use of colour plates in multimodal publishing.