"The Mayflower Reader" consists of a comprehensive selection of articles from the first seven volumes of "The Mayflower Descendant," an authoritative journal devoted to Pilgrim genealogy and history, discontinued in 1937 and now quite scarce. The seventy-eight articles selected for inclusion are of special significance to the descendants of the early Plymouth and Cape Cod settlers, now numbering in the hundreds of thousands and scattered to all points of the compass. They include transcriptions of wills, inventories, passenger lists, and memoirs, as well as a fair number of genealogies and historical sketches.