Six o'clock, a warm September evening; I sit in a closet of a hotel room in Amsterdam. What am I doing here? Away from my family, strange place, strange city. I'm visiting the Amsterdam Archive, the International Institute for Social History. It must be the most extraordinary institution of its kind in the world. Its holdings are awe-inspiring. Its staff are legendary. It sits in a new home in the Amsterdam docklands, a refurbished warehouse. In a single day I've worked on original papers by Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Sidney Webb, Leon Trotsky; even a letter from Max Weber to Bernstein (terrible script) and letters from Robert Michels, also to Bernstein. I've had the pleasure of meeting enthusiasts both on staff, and in the reading room; I saw someone reading the Melbourne Southern Advocate for Workers Council, edited by Jim Dawson,1 turned out to be Michael Buckmiller, the German expert on Karl Korsch. The staff introduced us; they must speak at least six languages each, tapping directly into the needs of Dutch, Germans, Italians, Anglophones, Hungarians, French and others. So what is this mecca? Its physical existence confirmed by its new, permanent location, the Amsterdam Institute now also has a freshly published history, confirming its past as well as its future. I say history, but probably handbook would be more accurate. Many people over the years have written about the Institute, including the German ultraleft Karl Heinz Roth.2 The Institute has published its own pamphlet, History and Activities, in 1985, and a book length study by Jan Lucassen, Tracing the Past,3 in 1989. Now there is the new handbook edited by Atie van der Horst and Elly Koen: Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH, Amsterdam.4 This is a book which all enthusiasts and especially libraries should have, for it is an indispensable guide to the collection. With history, it starts. As the book explains, the IISH was founded in 1935 by the aptly-named Professor N. W. Posthumus, with the financial support of 'De Centrale', the Central Workers' Insurance and Deposit Bank. De Centrale was a workers' insurance company, the statutes of which reserved a small percentage of its profits for cultural purposes on behalf of the labour movement. If this part of the initiative was clever, the next major interlude was exciting, not to say intriguing?or breathtaking, life-endangering. Prior to the Second World War the Institute took on a rescue function. Financially fluid, located in a politically neutral country with a remaining left-sympathetic culture, the IISH was able to act as a safehouse for radical and working class literature, not least of all from Germany. As the new volume observes, this was the period when the Bakunin papers were smuggled through a Vienna which was draped already