SMITH, Huston. The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2008.

Octavo. Full burgundy leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt lettering and design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 399 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published as The Religions of Man, New York: Harper & Row, 1958; revised and retitled The World's Religions, New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Huston Smith (1919–2016) was born in China to Methodist missionary parents, educated at Central College in Missouri and at the University of Chicago, and spent his career as one of the most respected teachers of comparative religion in the twentieth century — at Washington University, MIT, Syracuse, and the University of California at Berkeley, among other institutions. His work was characterised by a depth of personal engagement with the traditions he studied: he practised Vedanta Hinduism, Sufi Islam, and Zen Buddhism as well as the Christianity in which he was raised, not as a form of syncretism but as a sustained attempt to understand each tradition from the inside. He was the subject of a five-part documentary series by Bill Moyers for PBS. He died on 30 December 2016, eight years after signing this Easton Press edition.

The Religions of Man, first published in 1958, was an immediate success as a university textbook and a general introduction to the subject, praised for its ability to present the great traditions with sympathy and intellectual rigour simultaneously. Revised and retitled The World's Religions in 1991, it has sold over three million copies and remains one of the most widely used and most respected introductions to the subject available in English.

The book covers Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and the primal traditions of indigenous peoples, in each case attending not to the institutional and historical dimensions of religion but to what Smith called its inner or experiential core — what each tradition actually offers the individual who practises it, what it demands and what it gives, how it shapes the perception of the world and one's place within it. The approach was deliberate and methodologically significant: Smith argued that religions can only be understood from the inside, not as external phenomena, and the result is a book that reads less like a comparative survey than a series of invitations.

Near fine. Some mild spotting along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000550