This book collects the prefaces to all of the books in Cabell's Storisende edition of his work. As such, I didn't think at first that it would be worth getting. But the Storisende edition itself has its prefaces printed in difficult-to-read italics -- and it's also difficult to find every last volume -- so I decided to try it. It provides a more or less coherent summary of what Cabell thought he was doing with each of his books. Or, at least, what Cabell says he was trying to do; he is nothing if not an unreliable narrator. Perhaps it's better to say that it works as a coherent plan of the Storisende edition and why he laid it out as he did. He also succumbed to the urge to re-revise, apparently, in that he added some material that had been printed elsewhere. If someone is going to read all of Cabell, it's a useful book. ( )