He may well have been right for the pulp magazine audience of a generation ago, but assuming the readers of books to have a slightly more serious and patient outlook on literature, I have restored the Foreword, obtaining its text from a photostat of ERB's original manuscript, kindly furnished by Hulbert Burroughs.

If you are completely intolerant of forewords and wish, like the magazine audience of 1943, to plunge directly into the narration, you are welcome to skip the first 132 words of Skeleton Men of Jupiter. I personally find them a charming prelude and a minor but fascinating insight into the personality of Edgar Rice Burroughs, science-fictioneer.

The Martian series, of which this book is the final volume, is regarded by many readers as Burroughs' greatest sustained performance as a writer. Of course his Tarzan stories are the more famous, due largely to the popularity of their motion-picture adaptations. And there are many moments of excellence in the Venus and Pellucidar series, as there are in such "singles" as THE MOON MEN, THE MUCKER, THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, and I AM A BARBARIAN.

Still, for eleven volumes, the adventures of Captain John Carter of Virginia, upon the planet Barsoom, and the comparable deeds of heroism performed by Burroughs' other Martian heroes, represent a series of tales unmatched in their author's works, and, for that matter, unequalled in the annals of science-fiction adventure writing

The first three volumes in the series, originally appearing between 1912 and 1914, actually constitute a single super-epic. In them, John Carter,

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