Nietzsche's announcement of God's death first appeared here, in The Gay Science. Also, this is the first book in which he mentions the Eternal Reccurence (see the second to the last aphorism of the fourth "book"). Zarathustra's prologue is also here (that's the last aphorism of the fourth book). Book 5 of the Gay Science was added in 1885, and covers Nietzsche's mature philosophy (post-Zarathustra period). Overall a good read.

Section 312 of this book is called "my dog" (on a combination of being faithful, obtrusive and shameless, "just as entertaining, just as clever as every other dog" (p. 177), but it is about Nietzsche's relationship to his pain. There is another book by Nietzsche, THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW, in which section 38 mentions "The bite of conscience" as a stupidity, like the bite of a dog into a stone. (Portable Nietzsche, p. 68). There is also a section in THE GAY SCIENCE about beggars using a stone to knock where there is no bell. This translation has an entry in the index for "beggars, and courtesy." The Walter Kaufmann translation listed section titles on pages ix-xviii, but Kaufmann didn't have an entry in the index for beggars or for bell, and though I may have rung Walter Kaufmann's bell a number of times, before and since I started writing reviews, my mental efforts to knock the war against the United Stoners of America has reached such a modern point of indifference in its approach to everything that what Walter Kaufmann thought about anything is of hardly any concern to those who would like an understanding of what is going on. I expect this book, which allows a comparison of minor differences on major matters, to be quite useful to me. I find it extremely comical when this translation makes something funny that in Walter Kaufmann's translation was only puzzling, but even the index of this book skips from women to words with no entry for wooden iron. There is no entry for iron between interruption, intuition, Islam, and Italian opera. But in the text itself, just before section 357 "On the old problem: `What is German?' " the end of section 356 raises the primary question any modern philosopher can face:

Free society? Well, well! But surely you know, gentlemen, what one needs to build that? Wooden iron! The famous wooden iron! And it need not even be wooden. (p. 217)