Ian Stewart's extensive annotations added much historical information to the original little book "Flatland" by Edwin A. Abbott, with Introduction, Notes and Appendix by Ian Stewart. (See also his book 50 "Flatterland".)

In 1884, in Victorian England, a headmaster and Shakespearean scholar named Edwin Abbott Abbott – that’s right – two Abbotts – wrote a classic of scientific popularization called "Flatland." Written under the pseudonym A. Square, it tells of a two-dimensional world, a flat Euclidean plane that came from the geometry textbooks of his school. The inhabitants of Flatland are geometric figures – lines, triangles, squares, pentagons . . . A. Square’s narrow Victorian attitudes are shattered by rumors of the Third Dimension, confirmed by a visitor from that extra-dimensional realm who is named The Sphere. "Flatland" reads like a novel, but its purpose was serious and substantial. Abbott focused not on the Third Dimension, but on the Fourth Dimension. Could a space of more than three dimensions exist? Abbott softened up his readers’ resistance to this outlandish notion by making them imagine how a Flatlander would respond to the outrageous suggestion that a Third Dimension could exist. (He had a second purpose: to satirize the rigid social structure of Victorian England – especially the lowly status of women.)

The original Flatland was a real gem which I first read as an undergrad. But the annotated version by Ian Stewart has all of the original’s charm plus Steward’s many interesting notes about others – scientists and mathematicians – and their involvement with extra dimensions. Abbott probably inspired H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. This book has double columns: inner columns for Abbott’s Flatland and outer columns for Steward’s extensive notes (they take up about 2/3 of the book but they, and his Appendix, are as interesting, if not more so, as is Flatland. In Victorian England there was speculation about a fourth dimension as a way to explain how ghosts, spirits or angels could mysteriously appear and disappear. This may have inspired Abbott. Some speculated that time could be a fourth dimension before Einstein. This book will s t r e t c h your imagination in a fun and enlightening way. You need not be a math whiz to thoroughly enjoy "The Annotated FLATLAND." I highly recommend it and also the very informative post-text material, especially his 27-pp Appendix: The Fourth Dimension in Mathematics. Stewart's additions make the original gem of a book into a double gem.