The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion » (Special Value)

Most readers are familiar with the one volume version of The Golden Bough as an abridgement of the third edition, made by Frazer in 1922. The two-volume edition that was familiar to Hardy and Yeats remains a sketch. The full length third edition is Frazer’s definitive statement in which the King of the Wood appears in a radically new guise. That is the edition reprinted here.

Booknews

St. Martin's Press has for some time now accepted the noble mission of keeping Frazer's (1854-1941) seminal work (essentially a transhistoric, comparative anthropology of folklore, magic, and religion) before the public in the complete and original form of its third edition (originally published in London by Macmillan, 1911-1915), rather than the ubiquitous abridgments which debase both the subject and the author's magisterial command of his materials and his art. Contrary to opinion from some corners, this is no relic--in the complete form presented here, it is nothing less than a window through which the modern world can watch its own emergence--a work worthy of the company of, say, Marx and Freud. Which makes the publication on acidic paper an egregious error--depriving the account of the endurance it deserves. (RC) Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)