Long and short: Every historical document included in the book is 10/10, excepting they needed to include Gods, Demi-gods, and Heroes. They would have had to talked to Moorcock and the Howard Estate to make it happen, and the book would have cost $120 instead of $100, but they should have done that if they wanted to make a complete history. They should have made it $130 by including Judge's Guild and then realized they should have cut the book in two halves (each around 400 pages) and made each cost $80. Beyond that, my problems are with the production and the production team itself.
1: All the works included are digest-sized, and printed on full 8 1/2" x 11" sheets of paper. They should have been scaled up to compensate for the fact that the text is very small on these original documents. This is especially true for reproduced issues of The Strategic Review.
2: Many of the works are preceded by nearly empty pages with a small paragraph explaining frankly very little about the following that a reader wouldn't gain by... reading... the following. If it isn't history you need a damn good reason to include the text in a history book.
3: At least one of the documents has multiple pages of "Notes", which are all reproduced unnecessarily. You could toss on one notes page and it would be enough. Letters sometimes would have the envelope nonsensically included.
4: This is 576 pages. Five bookmarks is not the answer. The answer is making this 2-3 books. It is ridiculously unwieldy. If they had made the changes I request they could have sold all of them.
5: Lastly, the Preface, Foreword, and disclusions. Nobody actually gives a flying fuck about cultural insensitivity in a history book. That's how you end up rewriting history by discluding things that are "insensitive". Gods, Demigods, and Heroes absolutely should have been in this book. Judges Guild should have been included as well. D&D wasn't an island, there was bits of it scattered across multiple publications and multiple companies. You could even make the case that original Tunnels & Trolls deserved a chapter in this book. Another deal would have had to be struck there as well. It's just "too hard" to do that, eh?
In the end, I still give this product a 6/10, it's all on the dead white guys though. The living ones involved with it's production get 0/10. You're all idiots. You don't know who your core audience is, you don't know how to sell this book to them, and now you marked it down to half price on Black Friday the year it was produced because otherwise the book simply won't sell.
