There is, at present, no scarcity of polymer textbooks in the English language. Some of them attempt to cover the entire field, others focus their attention on certain parts of it, e.g., organic chemistry, physical chemistry, solid state physics, etc. This situation must necessarily raise the question, "Why publish another book?" and, even more, "Why translate a book which exists already in German?" and is to a lesser or greater extent legible and comprehensible to many English­ speaking scientists. It appears that a justification can be found in the special character of its content and presentation. As far as content is concerned, Vollmert's book is more encompassing than most existing treatises and, in this sense, almost represents a hybrid between a "textbook" and a "handbook." Numerous figures and tables convey directly a wealth of data. On the other hand, the text is designed to be educational and, in many instances, goes a long way to explain why certain properties are observed and why certain processes take place. These excursions into the intellectual clarification of somewhat complicated phenomena are a refreshing and unusual interruption of the main stream which presents synthesis, characteriza­ tion and properties of polymeric systems in the classical way.