The Gay Science is a remarkable book, both in itself and as offering a way into some of Nietzsche's most important ideas. The history of its publication is rather complex, and it throws some light on the development of his thought and of his methods as a writer. He published the first edition of it in 1882. In that version, it consisted of only four books, and had no Preface, though it did have the ‘Prelude in Rhymes’. A second edition appeared in 1887, which added a fifth book, the Preface, and an Appendix of further poems. This is the work as we now know it, and which is translated here.

Between the two editions of The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote two of his best-known works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886); the last section of Book Four of The Gay Science (342) is indeed virtually the same as the first section of Zarathustra. So the complete Gay Science brackets these two books, which are different from it and from each other. (Zarathustra, which is a peculiar literary experiment in a rhetoric drawn from the Bible, was once one of Nietzsche's most popular works, but it has worn less well than the others.) Book Five of The Gay Science anticipates, in turn, some of the themes of another famous book which was to follow in 1887, On the Genealogy of Morality, which is again different in tone, sustaining a more continuous theoretical argument.