Inherited skeletal disorders have a fascination for many medical and surgical disciplines. For the geneticist there is interest in the study of families and their inheritance of lesions. The paediatrician is concerned because most of the disorders present in childhood as a problem in clinical differential diagnosis. The radiologist is interested because of the manifest, multiple and curious bone changes that provide a challenge in diagnosis and classification. The orthopaedic surgeon is involved because they present a challenge in the management of the many and various lesions of the limbs and trunk. Most of the text books are slanted towards one or other aspect of the subject, depending upon the specialist interests of their author. Though informative to colleagues in their own discipline, the information which they contain is liable to be overwhelming in its complexity or unhelpful in its content for the orthopaedic surgeon or trainee. Frank Horan and Peter Beighton have aimed their admirable and concise monograph to help the orthopaedic surgeon-the one individual who is likely to be able to ameliorate the musculo-skeletal problems from which so many of the children and adults with these diseases suffer. In recent years, much more orthopaedic help has become available for dysplastics.