After Hans Gerth died in December 1978, I found myself among piles of
pa- pers. The amount was considerable, not because he was a "careful
archivist" as some assumed, but because he simply could not part with
any paper with writing on it. Besides his own typed scripts and notes,
there were off-prints given to hirn, papers written by his students,
many newspaper clippings, and letters dating back to the end of 1937. My
first task was to look for and collect his essay manuscripts still un-
known to the American public. Shortly after Gerth's death, Don
Martindale, our life-long friend and a former student of Gerth,
encouraged me to publish a volume of Gerth' essays. By going through the
piles, I found quite a few es- says, even one he wrote as early as 1930
as a student at the London School of Economics. I am sure he had no idea
that such an essay had survived among his piles of papers. I edited and
typed many of his draft essays; flew to New York to work together on the
final edited version with Joe Bensmann and Art Vidich; and co-published
it through the Greenwood Press, for which Martin- dale was an outside
consultant. I then began to sift through Gerth's correspondence files.
The corre- spondence was kept more or less in chronological order.
However, the pa- pers were loosely placed into folders and not fastened.