Having learned, quite accidentally, of the Springer Verlag archives, I arranged to spend two weeks in Heidelberg in May 1985 to look for material with a Russian or Soviet angle. My host, Heinz Sarkowski (a senior executive with the firm), was extremely interested and helpful. He is strongly committed to preserving and developing the firm's extraordinary archives and to making them available to scholars. He has prepared a preliminary edition of a finding aid, which I was able to use while there, and pamphlets (in German and English) presenting a brief description of the archives.