Smith & Kraus started the Annual Series in 1990, the year that we started publishing. In fact, the Best Men’s and Best Women’s Monologue of 1990 were the first books that Smith and Kraus published. It’s hard to believe that back in 1990 there were only a handful of monologue books for actors, and most of them were small staple bound volumes. And at the time, there were no collections of monologues from plays produced that season or the previous one.