The students of my generation had to survive without the internet and mobile phones, and depended on books and real paper to write on. As undergraduates in mathematics, we were always carrying yellow books around, and Springer-Verlag had a big part in our mathematical development. A little later, when I was a PhD student, two Springer Lecture Notes had a lasting influence on my own mathematical work: Homotopy Invariant Algebraic Structures on Topological Spaces by Boardman and Vogt [1] and The Geometry of Iterated Loop Spaces by Peter May [6]. These two books together shaped the foundation of the theory of operads about which I will write below.My contacts with Catriona go back to the preparation and publishing of "Sheaves in Geometry and Logic" with Saunders MacLane in the early 1990s. This period was also the beginning of the use of e-mail, and it is interesting and entertaining to see how e-mail customs and etiquette have changed over the years. I had my first e-mails to Catriona typed by a secretary, and Catriona had several people working for her who wrote on her behalf, all using an e-mail account and address under the name "Byrne". A few years after that, together with Albrecht Dold, Catriona helped me to get SLN 1616 into publishable shape. In more recent years, she remained most helpful in several matters, and I wish to thank her for that. Now I would like to come back to Boardman and Vogt, and May, and talk about some mathematics. To begin with, let me remind you that a (coloured) operad P consists of a set C = colours(P ) of colours, and for each sequence (c 1 , . . . , c n ; c) of elements of C (where n 0) a set of operations P (c 1 , . . . , c n ; c), to be thought of as taking inputs of "types" c 1 , . . . , c n , respectively, to an output of type c. Moreover, I. Moerdijk ( )