Why should anyone spend ?80 on this book? This is not intended as a criticism of either the Dutch or the German Operational Research Societies, of whose 1993 conference these proceedings are a permanent record. No; it is a comment on the academic book publishing industry, which chooses to make a compilation of the papers presented at a conference, sticks a (paperback) cover on them and charges a fancy price to libraries that feel obliged to buy the result. For my money, I should far rather take out a subscription to Interfaces or Operations Research and receive a stream of refereed papers that covers much the same material. Unfortunately, the European Journal of Operational Research has priced itself out of the personal subscription market, so I cannot recommend the natural home of the best of these papers as an alternative to buying this volume. Having put this volume in context, what more is there to say? Well I think that it actually shows Operational Research to be doing rather better on the Continent than it is in the UK. By that I mean that there is more 'real OR' being done, with real clients paying real money (or spending significant amounts of time with academics) to have their problems tackled. True, there is the same hefty bias among contributors to this volume towards academia as in the UK, but one is not left with the impression that OR is a subject to be practised by consenting adults in the privacy of their own universities. Even so, in his plenary lecture 'The Practice of OR', Gerrit Timmer quotes Alexander Rinnooy Kan: