From the dust jacket:  "The greatest collection of oriental tales, gorgeous in their myriad colors, breathtaking in their hazardous adventures, and intoxicating in their array of womanly charms, heretofore beyond the purse of the great masses of readers, is now offered to all at an unbelievably low cost. This vast material, heretofore in editions of many volumes, has now been set so as to fill no more than one easily handled single volume of nearly 1,300 pages, in clear and readable type. Included is not only the full and unexpurgated text of Lane's excellent and accurate translation of this vast work, but also all his notes, scholarly, enlightening, and absolutely necessary for the full enjoyment of these stories from strange lands. Who does not recall those old favorites of our earliest reading, Scheherazade, Aladdin, the Sleeper Wakened, Sinbad the Sailor, and many equally dear to memory? But to read them now as entertainment for grown-ups, these old tales, in their fullness, take on a new, sharper, more sophisticated hue, again to hold us in their grip with their humor, pathos, heroics, scurrility, naivete, languor, passion, glamour - an unforgettable phantasmagoria to be found nowhere else in all the literatures of the world."