Baen hard cover with dust jacket, exclusively published by and for the Science Fiction Book Club; July 1989; SFBC # 15035; 498 pages, cover art by Tom Kidd. 8vo (8.5" x 5.5") Preface by David Drake. Only hard cover edition of Baen paperback original. Omnibus collection of five classic fantasy stories by science fiction and fantasy authors L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, gathering material previously published in three volumes as The Incomplete Enchanter (1941, containing the novellas The Roaring Trumpet, and The Mathematics of Magic; 14th place, 1987 Locus Poll Award, All-Time Best Fantasy Novel), The Castle of Iron (1950), and Wall of Serpents (1960, containing the novellas The Wall of Serpents, and The Green Magician), and represents an expansion of the earlier omnibus The Compleat Enchanter, which contained only the material in the first two volumes. The omnibus is the first edition of the authors' Harold Shea series to be complete in one volume.
The Harold Shea stories are parallel world tales in which universes where magic works coexist with our own, and in which those based on the mythologies, legends, and literary fantasies of our world and can be reached by aligning one's mind to them by a system of symbolic logic. Psychologist Harold Shea and his colleagues Reed Chalmers, Walter Bayard, and Vaclav Polacek (Votsy), travel to several such worlds, joined in the course of their adventures by Belphebe and Florimel of Faerie, who become the wives of Shea and Chalmers, and Pete Brodsky, a policeman who is accidentally swept up into the chaos. The five stories collected in The Complete Compleat Enchanter explore the worlds of Norse mythology in "The Roaring Trumpet," Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in "The Mathematics of Magic," Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (with a brief stop in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan) in "The Castle of Iron," the Kalevala in "The Wall of Serpents," and Irish mythology in "The Green Magician."
