Last week the venerable publisher John Wiley & Sons made a surprise announcement that it would purchase Blackwell Publishing Ltd. for about $1.13-billion, an acquisition likely to have broad consequences for the world of academic journals and libraries. Assuming that the deal is completed, Wiley's scientific, technical, and medical division will be known as Wiley-Blackwell. The combined division will publish more than 1,200 scholarly journals, bringing the company within shouting distance of the giants Reed Elsevier (2,200 journals) and Springer (1,500). Taylor & Francis, which made unsuccessful overtures toward Blackwell in 2002, will drop to fourth place, with 1,050 journals. But if Wiley and Blackwell are enjoying a quasi-marital bliss, research librarians are expressing anxiety and dismay at yet another step in the consolidation of the academic-publishing industry. The latest deal is causing special concern because Blackwell has been broadly regarded as the most benign of the for-profit scholarly publishers, and librarians are uncertain whether its prices and practices will survive the merger.