The second volume compiling the best of Dragon Magazine, comes out towards the end of 1981 and is a great way for people, before there was such a thing as the Internet, to be able to access all this semi-official information that TSR was putting out in what was essentially their house magazine. 

At the time if you wanted to know more about how to make a Samurai NPC, for example, something which came out in the March 1976 issue you would have to either be lucky enough to be able to order a back issue and for some miracle it still being available, or know someone with a copy of the magazine, this volume solves that.

It’s a marked improvement over Vol. I, with clear signposting of the date and issue that each article is taken from, divided into useful sections (all the NPCs together, all the Gygax’s From the Sorcerer’s Scroll columns together and so on) and with new art which helps tie the volume together as one coherent whole, this would be invaluable for people who did not subscribe to the Magazine or didn’t subscribe to it early enough and needed to catch up.