Mr. Herbert Norris's work has long been a staple for members of the SCA and anyone else who may be interested in costume history to one degree or another. Anyone with a complete set of the original books could count themselves fortunate indeed as they were nigh upon unobtainable, until now. This book has many pen and ink illustrations of everything from shoes to jewelry to decoration and also many good drawings of construction for various types of garb--male and female. This is a book that the experienced seamstress can make use of, it does not go into construction details, it generally just shows you where the seams were! For a book originally published in 1927, line drawings were the norm (approximately 16 glossy color drawings are included in the center of this book--many apparently drawn by Norris himself--I don't recall if these appeared in the original work). If you are looking for hard historical fact--you may find this work a bit lacking. It's a quick reference work--use pictures of original sources to back it up, but I've always found Norris's drawings to be quite reasonable fascimilies. Dover claims that this is an unabridged text, however, at my first quick glance through this rather fat paperback, I have my doubts that all of the illustrations were included that are in the original volumes. This book is the original volume two of the series according to the cover text. If there's anyone out there with an original set I'd love to see a write up to see if you believe it's really unabridged here!