This reissue of Richard Titmuss's classic contribution to welfare theory, The Gift Relationship, combines the original text with a certain amount of editing used in the version edited by myself and John Ashton and published by LSE books in 1997. Our editing removed obvious anomalies and errors and integrated the sometimes very long and informative notes at the bottoms of the pages into the main text. We also added a bibliography. These practices have been retained in this edition. But the new material incorporated in the 1997 edition – on AIDS, advances in transfusion medicine and the gift of human milk – is not reproduced here. In this edition we have also included Titmuss's original preface and the seven appendices that appeared in the first 1970 publication.