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These comments are about the new third edition of Bryan Manly’s “Multivariate Statistical Methods: A Primer”. I should make it clear right away that I am confident that the fault lies not with Bryan himself but with some [Junior? Ex?] copy writer at CRC Press. Whilst I scarcely know Bryan myself (ten minutes chat at a large conference a while ago) I know we have many mutual friends and acquaintances, apologies in advance if my complaint is taken personally. I am sure I am one of many who think highly of this book and I have included it on my reading lists for my own multivariate courses for many years. I recommend it particularly to numerate but non-mathematical scientists (especially graduate archaeologists) as being full of good common sense, useful intuitive explanations and lots of interesting examples including the raw data, many of them with an archaeological background. My only reservation has been that the second edition (1994) is beginning to seem a little dated. Thus I was very glad to see the announcement of a third edition with the clear statement “Topics new to this edition include confirmatory factor analysis, the use of mixture models for cluster analysis, and the emerging techniques of data mining and neural networks” (taken verbatim from the CRC website and repeated on Amazon). Thinking of Chapman & Hall as one of the top three or four statistical publishers of high repute and knowing the second edition well I ordered this using Amazon’s seductive 1-Click rather than the lengthy process of requesting an inspection copy from the publisher. It has arrived and on the back cover it states “Features: Presenting new topics including confirmatory factor analysis, the use of mixture models for cluster analysis, neural networks, and data mining. Provides all the data used in the book on a companion website.” Looking in the index under Data Mining it takes you to P201 (Chapter 13, Epilogue): “Recent developments in multivariate analysis have been made in the closely related field of data mining…………. . This topic has not been considered in this book,…” (and then the reader is referred to Hand et al (2001) – a good reference. Under Cluster Analysis, Mixture of several populations, you are taken to P135 , “An approach to clustering which has not been considered in this chapter assumes that the available data come from a mixture of several distributions…” Confirmatory factor analysis is not included in the index, nor the contents list but in the factor analysis chapter, P102, it is mentioned in the final paragraph of ‘further reading’ and the reader referred to two other texts for details. Neither neural networks nor a website for data sets are mentioned in the index or contents list or preface and as yet I have not found them in the text anywhere. However, the data sets are easily found in the standard CRC site at http://www.crcpress.com/e_products/downloads/. I suppose the lesson is that the buyer should beware, but I think it sad that we have to be aware of publishers such as this. Nick Fieller -- Dr Nick Fieller Department of Probability & Statistics University of Sheffield Sheffield, S3 7RH U.K. tel: +44 (0) 114 222 3831 (direct & office/voicemail) fax: +44 (0) 114 222 3759 http://www.shef.ac.uk/nickfieller