Jerry Marion published the original edition of Classical Electromagnetic Radiation in 1965 under the imprint of Academic Press. Its distinguishing characteristics were:
These characteristics, together with Marion's fluent writing style, earned respect for the book and often led to its being the textbook-of-choice as a citation in research papers whose authors wanted to document a point "that every well-educated physicist should know" about classical EandM. On the other hand, most undergraduate course sequences did not proceed further than the junior-year course. The book found a small but steady market. There was no solutions manual for the first edition.
As it happened, in the 1970s Swarthmore did have a "third-tier" undergraduate EandM course, which Marion's book fitted nicely. After teaching this course for a couple of years, I had compiled a list of comments, quibbles, and errata which I sent to the publisher, who in turn sent it on to Marion (whom I did not know). A few months later I got a letter from him saying that Academic Press had asked for a new edition and proposing that I join as co-author, carrying out revisions of the sort indicated on my list, and preparing a full solutions manual as he had done for his companion text Classical Dynamics. I was deeply honored by the invitation. I made those revisions that I felt were necessary but left the great majority of the text intact in deference to the original author. I also struggled, kicking and screaming, with the Solutions Manual. This would have been an even more daunting project were it not for extensive solution-notes prepared by my colleague Bill Elmore, who had preceded me as instructor of our course at Swarthmore. The labor paid off, not only in my own education, but in the fact that, when forced to actually write out a coherent solution, I often saw a way to go back and clarify the statement of the problem. In the end, I believe, the Second Edition's problem sets were greatly improved by the exercise of preparing the SM.
The Second Edition was published in March 1980. In August 1981 Jerry Marion died prematurely at age 52. The irony for me was that Jerry and I had never met; indeed I only learned of his death when I read the obituary in Physics Today the following January.
In 1992 I began preparation of the Third Edition, the title having passed by then from Academic Press to Harcourt-Brace to Saunders College Publishing (all subsidiaries of Holt Rinehart and Winston). With Marion no longer on the scene, my revisions turned out to be much more extensive: about 40% of the text is new or significantly rewritten. Likewise the problem sets have been substantially revised, and the Solutions Manual is even more complete than for the previous version. Meanwhile Stephen Thornton undertook a similar posthumous revision of Marion's companion textbook Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems (3rd ed. 1988 to 5th ed. 2004).
In 2002, the publisher's imprint passed from Saunders College to Brooks/Cole Publishing (Cengage Learning). In 2009 a downloadable electronic version (PDF) of the Solutions Manual became available.
Mark Heald
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