This volume grew out of an international conference which was held in June 2009 at McGill University, in honour of Professor Peter Russell, on the occasion of his 70th birthday and his retirement from McGill. It contains 19 refereed articles, essentially all in the area of affine algebraic geometry and, more specifically, in the following subjects: automorphisms and group actions, surfaces, embeddings of certain rational curves in the affine plane, and problems in positive characteristic geometry. These are also some of the themes running through the very substantial body of work done by Professor Russell in this relatively young branch of algebraic geometry. The volume also includes a foreword, in which Professor Russell shares some personal reminiscences on the development of affine algebraic geometry, a field he describes as ""loosely speaking, the study of affine spaces and algebraic varieties closely resembling them.