At its meeting in April 1990 at the University of Cambridge, the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) decided that the largely unorganized archives of the Union should be properly arranged and catalogued. Simultaneously, the Executive Committee expressed the wish that a history of the Union should be written 1). As Secretary of the Union, I had proposed that these issues be dis cussed at the Cambridge meeting, but without having had in mind any personal role in the practical execution of such projects. At that time, the papers of the IMU were stored in Zurich, at...