The third volume collects the best and most useful articles of Dragon Magazine, this focuses completely on AD&D articles, which goes to show what most people read Dragon for. It also gives us an early glimpse of the soon to come out art for the Frank Mentzer Basic D&D box, which sports a more complete version of this same Larry Elmore dragon illustration in its cover. 

Divided into four helpful sections one collecting the articles covering details about the players’ races and their gods, another covering only dragons, a third section with details on classes including the articles on cantrips by Gygax and lastly a section with some new monsters and NPC classes like the Alchemist and Archer.

By putting most of the articles with real practical use at the playing table into a volume this is a really useful volume, not only for people who did not buy the original issues and who would have a hard time finding all the back issues to get this info, but also for people who already had the magazines but wanted this information in a usable format, rather than carrying around 20 issues of Dragon. Nothing new, but an invaluable tool for DMs in a time before there was an internet where you can just google this up, this was a must buy at the time.