Issue No. 39 of the Be Star Newsletter contains articles, announcements, and abstracts that we have received and posted on our website since we finalized the previous issue in March of 2007. We continue our practice of assembling an issue after we have accumulated about 50 pages of material. Included here are five articles based on talks presented at the meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars at the 26th IAU General Assembly, twelve announcements in our What's Happening section, and 32 abstracts of published and accepted papers on active B stars.

Many years ago one of my colleagues remarked that anyone who does research on Be stars for a long enough period of time eventually writes at least one paper on γ Cas. Well, I can't vouch for this but γ Cas does have the longest spectroscopic history of any Be star and there is information on its long-term behavior that simply does not exist for most Be stars. I feel that any model for the Be phenomenon must explain both the short and long-term variability in the disk emission. But the observational data are becoming increasingly difficult to secure. Today it is virtually impossible to monitor the emission-line variability in Be stars at professional observatories with the cadence needed to characterize its behavior. But an enthusiastic amateur community with excellent CCD spectrographs is filling the void. Included in this issue is an article in which both short-term and long-term emission behavior in γ Cas is reported from observations made at amateur observatories. Nearly 40 years of coverage of γ Cas (see cover) suggests a possible long-term Balmer emission cycle of about 8 years. Time will tell if the apparent trend continues.

We continue to post short articles and abstracts on our website as they are accepted ( http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dam3ma/benews/ ). Abstracts normally appear within 48 hours of receipt. Please send contributions by email to benews@mucen.usc.edu with a copy to dam3ma@virginia.edu. We prefer LaTex format and require that abstracts be submitted as a LaTex file using the template provided on our website. We can handle most contemporary picture formats for illustrations. We encourage you to contribute to our Community Comments section that we introduced in Issue No. 38. In an open forum researchers have the opportunity to voice their opinions on scientific issues and terminology that will become part of the published literature such as one finds in unedited discussion in conference proceedings.

The next Issue of the Newsletter will contain the proceedings from the forthcoming business/scientific meeting of the Working Group on Active B Stars at the IAU General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 2009 August 6. We will also include information on IAU Symposium No. 272 "Active OB stars: structure, evolution, mass loss, and critical limits" that will be held in Paris from 2010 July 19-23.

The editors wish to thank all who contributed to this issue and look forward to receiving your contributions for Issue No. 40. See you at the IAU General Assembly in Rio in August and at IAU S272 in a year!

We appreciate the continuing support from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Georgia State University for the production of the paper edition of the Be Star Newsletter and from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia for web hosting.

Gerrie Peters, Editor-in-Chief