As with the annual anniversary issue of the eponymous magazine, the cover depicts Eustace Tilley with his monocle, in the classic iconograph.

The cover subtitles also include "1940 to 1950," but the copyright date of 1949 suggests that material from 1950, and possibly the latter part of 1949, was not included; individual years listed after "copyright" also recite each of the years in the 1940s, but not 1950.

The authors (and some selected story titles) are In the short Foreword, the editors state that "[s]ome notable stories are missing" for purposes of balance, and also that "parody, nonsense, and casual essays" have been excluded as "outside the scope of this book."

There is a conventional table of contents and an index lists each story alphabetically by its author's last name.

This article about a collection of short stories published in the 1940s is a stub.