The idea of publishing this book on Perfumes: Art, Science and Technology grew out of the observation that, on the verge of the 1990s, there was really no state-of-the-art compilation of the relevant know-how on which the fragrance industry is based. It was obvious that such a compilation would be well received, not only by perfumers and fragrance chemists, but also by those involved in related trade and marketing or in the development and distribution of consumer products, by researchers from other fields, by students and, finally, by amateurs of perfumes in general. Therefore, we set out to find competent authors who were willing to contribute to the endeavour, and we did not do this unselfishly; on the contrary, we selected a wish-list of specialists who would provide us with new insight and characterize the trends and research priorities determining the future. Thus, we were counting on learning much ourselves in the course of the project. We were more than pleasantly surprised by the reactions to our first letter-and so was Elsevier. We certainly had not expected perfumers who are usually much more 'doers' than 'writers' to react in such an enthusiastic way; especially, the spontaneous affirmative answer from the famous E. Roudnitska created a momentum which contributed significantly to the successful comple­ tion of this book. But, of course, we should not create the impression that the other authors' chapters are less important, and we thank all of them heartily for their invaluable effort.