Contents for Help on The CD-ROM Version of the Works of John Ruskin
 The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM Help

	Introduction Introduction by Michael Wheeler Installation Getting Started Finding Information Viewing Documents and Images
Navigation	Appendices
The Toolbar	Printing and Saving Text and Images
The Page Locator and Basic Search Bar	Viewing Images with the Acrobat Reader
The Main Search Dialogue Box	Additional Information
The Tables of Contents	Known Problems
The General Index

The History of the Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

An Article by James S. Dearden


Introduction
 Introduction to the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM

Introduction to the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM

by Professor Michael Wheeler

Director of the Ruskin Programme, Lancaster University

The CD-ROM

At the beginning of the twentieth century one of the greatest literary editions of all time was published: Cook and Wedderburn's 'Library Edition' of The Works of John Ruskin (1903-1912). The Library Edition is a major resource for those interested in all aspects of nineteenth-century culture, including literature and economics, art and architecture, science and religion. But today the Library Edition is both expensive and difficult to obtain. In readiness for the twenty-first century, general access to Ruskin's complete works is made possible through this attractively presented CD-ROM version. Here the reader can navigate rapidly and search accurately through the entire text (over nine million words in length) and more than 2,000 digitized graphic images - an incomparable teaching and research resource. This enables the user to retrace the kind of movement between texts and images which characterizes the associative mind of Ruskin himself - a brilliant polymath.

In order to place the CD-ROM in its historical and scholarly context, there follows a brief introduction to Ruskin and modern Ruskin studies. Click on the next topic button above to continue reading this introduction.


John Ruskin
 John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Ruskin was the greatest British art critic and social commentator of the Victorian Age. His ideas inspired the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the founding of the National Trust and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Today these ideas continue to inspire economic, architectural and environmental thinking, and there is currently a world-wide revival of interest in Ruskin's life and work.

Born on 8 February 1819, the son of a prosperous sherry importer, Ruskin became a published poet and writer on geology by the age of fifteen, by which time he knew the Bible intimately. Throughout his life he undertook extended tours of Britain and the Continent, providing material for literary works such as The Poetry of Architecture, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, Mornings in Florence, and The Bible of Amiens.

Ruskin's admiration for the work of J. M. W. Turner led to the writing of Modern Painters (5 vols), his magnum opus. After the publication of the third and fourth volumes in 1856, George Eliot wrote: 'I venerate him as one of the great Teachers of the day . . . . The two last volumes of Modern Painters contain, I think, some of the finest writing of this age.' By this time Ruskin's readership in America was even larger than that in Britain, and later his work shaped the thinking of Gandhi, Tolstoy and Proust.

Ruskin was a great teacher, campaigner and controversialist. In the early 1850s he championed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and taught in the Working Men's College, London. Later in his career he used his tenure of the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford to challenge established ideas on art and education. In the 1870s, while publishing his Oxford lectures, Ruskin also wrote Fors Clavigera, his monthly 'Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain'. Fors, and his lectures and books on socio-economic issues and on scientific topics, including Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris, The Crown of Wild Olive and Sesame and Lilies, The Queen of the Air and The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, reflect the breadth of his intellect, while his autobiographical writings, particularly Praeterita, reveal a sensitive and tormented mind.

Ruskin created the Guild of St. George, of which he was the first Master, and which still quietly continues his work today. He generously endowed the Guild's St. George's Museum in Sheffield, and the Ruskin Drawing School in Oxford. He taught many people how to draw, published The Elements of Drawing and The Elements of Perspective, and was himself a superb draughtsman, producing thousands of drawings and watercolours, many of which are reproduced in the Library Edition.

By the time Ruskin died at Brantwood on 20 January 1900, he had accumulated a large collection of material which reflects his extraordinary range of interests and achievements: the manuscript diaries and notebooks in which he recorded events, ideas and cloud formations, sketched the Stones of Venice and the geological strata of the Alps, drafted sermons, poems and lectures; his remarkable drawings through which he learned to observe the world in great detail, and which he used to teach others; literary manuscripts and editions of his own works; the photographs and daguerreotypes which added to his unique record of the external world. Much of this material, together with Ruskin's huge published oeuvre, formed the basis of Cook and Wedderburn's famous Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin.


 Ruskin Today

The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM is published by Cambridge University Press for The Ruskin Foundation, the body which cares for Brantwood, Ruskin's house on Coniston Water in the English Lake District, and for the foremost collection of works of art on paper (1,486), diaries (29), manuscripts (167), transcripts (138), letters (around 8,000), photographs and glass negatives (1,710), daguerreotypes (125), printed books (3,621) and other material relating to John Ruskin. The Ruskin Collection that is currently housed at Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight is moving to a purpose-built Ruskin Library at Lancaster University by the end of 1996, and thus closer to Brantwood, the established international memorial to Ruskin, where the remainder of the Ruskin Collection is displayed.

Education Trust Ltd. (owners of the Collection and of Brantwood) and Lancaster University have created the Ruskin Foundation, a registered Charitable Company Limited by Guarantee. In producing The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM, The Ruskin Foundation is fulfilling its particular object - 'the advancement of education in the life and work of John Ruskin and associated subjects'. The Ruskin Foundation wishes to play a leading role in making Ruskin and his ideas widely accessible as we approach the twenty-first century, and the pricing of the CD-ROM reflects that wish.

One reason for the widespread revival of interest in Ruskin is that he is once again 'relevant', a term from which the scholarly community tends to shy away. When the Ruskin Programme mounted an exhibition at Lancaster in 1992 entitled 'Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture', the connections made there between Ruskin's 'Lamp of Memory' and the debates about architecture that have raged in Britain in recent years struck a chord with those members of the public and of the architectural profession who visited the show. His work on environmental issues, particularly in the 1870s and 1880s, not only anticipates but also speaks directly to current debates and concerns. Ruskin's ideals represented a reaction against the reality of a polluted Britain. We find him writing prophetically in Fors 44, published in August 1874, on 'a soil of arsenic, and rain of nitric acid' (Library Edition, XXVIII, p. 134); and ten years after that, in his lecture on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), delivering to the London Institution the results of decades of careful observations of cloud formations affected by industrial pollution (XXXIV, pp. 9-41).

Of particular interest to our generation in this last decade of the millennium is Ruskin's apocalyptic mode. His social and aesthetic critique places his generation, and ours, under judgment, from The Seven Lamps to The Storm-Cloud, drawing on biblical prophecy while negotiating his shifting relationship to Evangelical tradition in the 'To-Day' of his personal motto, with its tacit warning, 'The night cometh, when no man can work' (I, p.xi). Similarly, Ruskin's attacks on Utilitarian political economy in the 1860s which influenced British social theory in the 1890s take on new life and meaning in the monetarist 1990s. The loving particularity of his drawings captivates a new generation that seeks to recover an attention to cultural specificity and transcultural values, in a so-called 'developed' world of crude commercialism which spawns the advertisers' graphic arts of subliminal enticement.

Here, then, are some of the ways in which Ruskin seems relevant again, and sharply challenging. But why the current scholarly interest? The Ruskin bibliography has not only lengthened in recent years; it has also become more sophisticated, with the publication of several biographies - headed by Tim Hilton's - and numerous important monographs, particularly in North America. A sense of new possibilities today flows from the publication of new editions of Ruskin letters (by John Bradley, Van Akin Burd, George Allan Cate, Ian Ousby, Olive Wilson), biographies (by Joan Abse, James S. Dearden, Tim Hilton, John Dixon Hunt, Wolfgang Kemp), collections of critical essays (edited by Harold Bloom, Robert Hewison, John Dixon Hunt, Robert Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik), studies on Ruskin and architecture (by Michael Brooks, Kristine Garrigan, Mark Swenarton, John Unrau, Michael Wheeler and Nigel Whiteley, et al.), and aesthetics (by Elizabeth Helsinger, Robert Hewison, George Landow, Linda Merrill), and drawing (by Christopher Newall, Nicholas Penny), and the juvenilia (by David Hanson, Sheila Emerson), and art criticism (by Linda Ferber, Susan Gordon), and women (by Helen Bauer, Dinah Birch), and social theory (by Peter Anthony, Linda Austin, Jeffrey Spear), and thought and religion (by Jay Fellows, Stephen Finley, Hilary Fraser, George Landow, Paul Sawyer, Michael Wheeler, Gary Wihl), and myth (by Dinah Birch, Raymond Fitch), and museums (by Janet Barnes, Catherine Morley), and Italy (by Jeanne Clegg and Paul Tucker, Anthony Harris), and Switzerland (by James S. Dearden, John Hayman), and Turner (by Dinah Birch), and Bradford (by Malcolm Hardman), and so on, as well as bibliographical work on Ruskin (by John Bradley, George Allan Cate, James S. Dearden, Brian Maidment).

Ruskin today is Ruskin the polymath, the thinker and teacher who demands what we would now call a 'multidisciplinary' or 'interdisciplinary' treatment. Whatever the current trends are, however, all of us involved in Ruskin studies today are perhaps most deeply indebted to three individual Ruskin scholars: E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, editors of the Library Edition of 1903-1912 reproduced on this CD-ROM, and James S. Dearden, Curator of the Ruskin Collection. The three come together here in the form of Dearden's fascinating history of the labours of Cook and Wedderburn - available on the CD-ROM.


What this CD is and What it is not
 What this CD is and What it is not.

The most obvious and pressing reason for producing this CD-ROM of the Library Edition is that the original book edition is very difficult to obtain. The most committed Ruskin scholars tend to have their own set of Cook and Wedderburn, but not all. Even those who do will wish to acquire the CD-ROM, either for themselves or for their institutional libraries, as it will allow them to carry out searches which can only be performed electronically, and it comes in a portable and convenient form.

Nineteenth-century scholars throughout the world recognize the weight (literal and metaphorical) of the Library Edition. Yet the very comprehensiveness of the 39 volumes is daunting. A typical search for information begins in vol. 39 with the double-column Index of almost 700 pages, and ends with a desk covered with large numbers of bulky volumes. For the nature of Ruskin's mind - associative and labyrinthine - and the complexity of his intellectual project - multidisciplinary and polymathic - means that everything in his oeuvre refers to everything else, and that the reader is constantl y drawn into cross-reference and comparison. The awkwardness of this process is compounded by the fact that the Index, though a classic of its kind, is, perforce, incomplete: for example, five entries under 'Tradition' compare with 273 occurrences identified by the search facility on the CD-ROM.

The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM is tagged in such a way that word searches are simple and rapid, so it will supply everything that the book edition does, and more:

All 39 volumes of the Library Edition, including Index volume

Digitized images of all plates (including colour) and figures, which can be magnified or reduced

Rapid search and retrieval with straightforward screen commands

Coding and page breaks to match the original

All text and plates can be printed out

Each page of the CD-ROM has exactly the same text, running-head, foot-noting and paragraphing as the original.

In the original, pages on which there are full-page plates are unnumbered (e.g. following page 8 in Volume I). Information is provided in the CD-ROM indicating the page of text they face, and whether the plates are printed on the recto (r) or verso (v), as this is sometimes important, e.g. :

Houses and Cathedral Spire, Ulm.

1835

[f.p.8, r]

Where one plate faces another plate it is labelled accordingly:

[f.pl.00, v]

Having explained what The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM is, it should now be made clear what it is not:

it is not an 'edition' of the Library Edition - i.e. an improvement upon it; therefore the Library Edition has been electronically reproduced exactly as it is, with its inaccuracies and internal inconsistencies unaltered;

it is not a facsimile edition of the Library Edition - i.e. an exact replica of it; therefore the CD-ROM, while looking attractive on the screen and the page (when passages are printed out), does not imitate the fount, line-length, and so on, of the original.

So the reader will find short lines at the foot of the majority of pages, where an ellipsis (...) indicates the end of the page. In preparing the CD-ROM it has been necessary to identify those hyphens occurring at the end of lines in the Library Edition which are 'hard' hyphens (e.g. 'brick-fields') rather than merely line-break hyphens (e.g. 'metro-polis'), and to check doubtful cases of the hard hyphens against the Oxford English Dictionary - Cook and Wedderburn's policy on hyphens being somewhat inconsistent. Greek words have been transcribed without accents.

Cook and Wedderburn's famous Index contains mistakes, so that the reader sometimes turns to a page as indicated in the Index, only to find that the subject of the search is not actually there. (It often turns out to be in the same volume, but on a different page, or in a different volume but on the same page that was indicated.) The CD-ROM solves this annoying problem through word-search: searching for a particular subject will produce a list of the volume and page numbers, and such an error can be easily spotted.

Michael Wheeler

Lancaster University


 Installation

To install the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM, turn on your computer and, if you have an external rather than an internal CD-ROM drive, turn on your CD-ROM drive first. Insert the CD-ROM (printed side uppermost) into your CD-ROM drive and close the drive or press home the disk caddy (whichever applies to your system).

Assuming that your computer and CD-ROM drive are now turned on, do the following:

If you are using Microsoft Windows 3.1, start Windows in the usual way, access File Manager and then access your CD-ROM drive (this is often named D:), and locate the program WINSTALL.EXE and double-click on it in quick succession.

If you are using Windows 95, click on Start and in the Run dialogue box type in the command D:\WINSTALL.EXE (where D: is the name of CD-ROM drive). This will invoke the installation program.

If your system setup, configuration or resources (RAM and available hard disk space) are in any way incompatible with the CD-ROM, the installation program should notify you. If so, please take the necessary steps to correct the problem and re-install the CD-ROM.


 Getting Started

If the software has installed correctly, the installation process will have created a new Microsoft Windows Program Group and Program Item icon. This icon, labelled The Works of John Ruskin and featuring Ruskin's colophon, is your means of accessing the CD-ROM database.

To start The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM (the application), move your mouse pointer over the icon and double-click on it twice in quick succession. After a brief pause a Windows splash screen will appear which will stay in view for a few seconds. The splash screen displays copyright and other information relating to the application.

You will now be faced with the main user interface screen which looks like this:

See also :

The Toolbar

The Input and Basic Search Bar


 Finding Information

Any word or phrase except stopwords (see below) included within The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM can be sought. The text is stored in the form of a full-text database which means that every word which occurs within each of the 39 volumes has been indexed.

NOTE: Stopwords are words which have a very large number of postings (e.g. words like THE, TO, FROM, IT, AT etc.) and words which have a special meaning in conjunction with searching (e.g. words like AND, OR, ADJ, NEAR). Words included in what is known as the Stopword list have not been indexed and so cannot be searched for.

There are various methods by which you can locate information in the CD-ROM version of the Works of John Ruskin. Click on a hotspot below to view details of these choices.

 Using the General Index (Volume 39)

 Navigating the CD-ROM using the tables of contents

 Using the Dictionary

 Invoking the Main Search Dialogue Box


 Viewing Documents and Images

Once a search (whether complex or simple) has been run, the retrieval software will notify you in the lower status bar of the number of pages it has located which contain the word or words which you have searched for. The first matching document found will be displayed, and the search term(s) will be highlighted.

The documents retrieved are ranked according to their order within the original volumes. Alternatively, you may change the default setting for document ranking (using the Change Preferences Toolbar button) and instead opt to use relevance ranking which displays documents in the hitlist according to their perceived relevance (this function uses a proven computer probability program developed by Personal Library Software Inc. and is particularly useful when a search results in a very large number of hits. )

To display the next matching document in the specified order of retrieval, click once on the Next Hit button on the toolbar.

To display a list of all matching documents, in the specified order of retrieval, click once on the Search Results button on the toolbar. Any page entry in this list can then be displayed by double-clicking on the list. Click on the Search Results button again to hide the list.

When a document (text page) is displayed, images which originally were embedded within pages are displayed in situ, although their precise position on the page when compared with the pages in the original Library Edition may be slightly different. Also, since the document page display windows can be re-sized, the position of images will change when this occurs.

When an image from the original Library Edition appears as a tip-in (defined as a full page image which is referred to in most cases as Facing Page x ) it does not appear in situ and instead is represented by a small icon (as below) above the original image's caption.

To display such images you should click twice on the icon with your left-hand mouse button. Clicking on the image display button calls up the Adobe Acrobat display software which in turn locates the appropriate image and displays it. If you wish to pan, zoom, minimise or otherwise change the display of the image in view please refer to the on-line Help menu within the Acrobat application itself.

If you wish to access all of the tip-in images stored on the CD-ROM you can do so via the File Open main menu option on the Acrobat toolbar. The images are stored by volume in separate directories on the CD-ROM and each Acrobat image ends in the file extension .PDF (e.g. \IMAGES\VOL1\*.PDF)

The images are listed sequentially and the PDF file name of the image in view is shown on the image's display Window. To close down the Acrobat image display software double-click on the close Window button or minimize it by clicking once on the minimize button in the top right-hand corner of the Acrobat application.

See also :

Printing and saving text and images

Viewing images with the Acrobat Reader


 The Toolbar

 Table of Contents

This button displays the primary table of contents (Volume titles) to the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM.

 Main Index to the Works of John Ruskin

This button displays the index to the entire 39 volumes which comprise the Works of John Ruskin, reproducing the General Index volume (Vol. XXXIX) from the Cook and Wedderburn Library Edition.

 Dictionary Browse

This button displays an alphabetical list of all the words which have been indexed in the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM plus the number of times each word occurs within the entire work.

 Export to Rich Text Format (RTF)

Pressing this button sends the current document (the one whose text window is highlighted) to a directory of your choice with the extension *.RTF. RTF (Rich Text Format) is a common typesetting language which word processing packages such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect can handle. For example, you can import an RTF document straight into Microsoft Word and it will preserve the format of the document and all embedded images.

 Print Page

This button allows you to print the current document (the document which you have open and whose window is highlighted). To print other documents simply click on the document window and then on the print button with your mouse. The documents are printed out in the form in which they appear on screen, which includes any embedded image or images.

 Main Search

This button displays the Main Search Dialogue Box and allows you to run complex searches against the CD-ROM database.

 Next Hit

This button is used to display the hit retrieved after a search of the text has been performed. A document hit means the pages which meet the search criteria NOT the next consecutive page within a volume. As further hits are displayed, previous pages are closed down. The maximum number of hits or documents which can be displayed at any one time can be changed (the default setting is five documents).

 Search Results

This button displays a list of the titles of all matching pages located after a search has been run against the CD-ROM database. Adjacent to each document title is the number of hits found per page. The hit list displays documents in sequential order according to where they are found in the original Library Edition. The total number of documents which have been found to match the search criteria is listed in the caption bar.

 Search History

This button displays the searches which you have performed during a search session (a series of consecutive searches). The Search History box displays the searches you have run, the results obtained and the number of documents which contained the term or terms you searched for.

 Close Document

This button is used to close documents down. The Close Document button works on the current (highlighted) document displayed.

 Change Preference Settings

This button displays a dialogue box which allows you to change various application settings including the document text display windows, document position and the order in which documents and document titles are displayed (in sequence or in terms of their perceived relevance).

 On-line Help

This button activates the context-sensitive on-line user help system, which can also be accessed at any time by clicking on the F1 key.

See also :

Getting Started

Finding Information

The Page Locator and Basic Search Bar


Input and Status Bar
 The Page Locator and Basic Search Dialogue Bar

At the bottom of the screen is an input and search bar which can be used both for locating text by volume and page number information and for basic searching of the database.

Basic searching is a quick and easy method of searching for individual words or phrases. You may use Boolean, positional and other operators within the search dialogue bar if you wish, though because of the limited space available to key in text you may find it easier to use the larger Main Search Dialogue Box which also includes extra search facilities.

On this Page Locator and Basic Search Dialogue Bar there are three input boxes and four buttons. Viewed from left to right, the input boxes and associated buttons have the following purposes:

Input box 1 is used to key in the number (1-39 inclusive) of a volume from the Works of John Ruskin (please use Arabic numbers not Roman numerals when entering volume numbers in this box).

Input box 2 is used to key in the page number of a particular volume specified in the first input box so that you can then go straight to the page (please use Arabic numbers for main text pages and lower-case Roman numerals to access the preliminary matter, e.g. 1, 2, and ii, iv).

On either side of the page number input box are two arrow controls, one facing left and one right, used respectively to display the previous and the next page.

	Go to the previous page. This can also be achieved by pressing the left cursor or by clicking the - (minus) key on the numeric keypad then ENTER.
	Go to the next page. This can also be achieved by pressing the right cursor or by clicking the + (plus) key on the numeric keypad then ENTER.
To the right of the next page arrow is a button which enables you to locate the page specified in input boxes 1 and 2 (see above).

	Go to the page and volume specified in the adjacent input boxes
Input box 3 is used to key in a search term or terms. Once a term has been keyed in, the adjacent button is used to run the query against the full-text database on the CD-ROM. You can switch between these two access methods at any time. For example, you may perform a full-text search, find a document on which appears a reference to another document and then use the volume and page input boxes to locate and then display the page referred to.

	Execute a full text search on the specified term or terms and display the first matching page.
NOTE: If you key in a Volume number greater than 39 the location system will default to Volume I; if you key in a Volume number between 1 and 39 but a page number which is greater than the number of pages in a particular volume and then click on the locate button you will be taken to the first page of the Volume you wish to access.

See also :

The Toolbar

Getting Started


Using the General Index
 The General Index

In order to locate particular works by Ruskin, sections of works, or illustrations within works, it is possible to look them up in the various indexes provided by Cook and Wedderburn as follows :-

General Index.	Volume XXXIX	(under the Ruskin, John entry, the sub-divisions of which include his writings - sections 36-39)
Bibliography Catalogue of Ruskin's Drawings	(volume XXXVIII)	both of which will give you volume and page references.

Clicking once on the Main Index button on the toolbar displays the index to the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM.

For ease of use, the Index facility is hierarchical and at its top level is displayed in the form of a simple list of letters from A - Z, adjacent to which are arrow symbols. Clicking twice on any letter calls up the next level in the index hierarchy ...

... and ultimately displays a page from the original index.

When you have found an index item you wish to access, enter the volume and page number into the input boxes on the Page Locator and Basic Search Dialogue Bar and press the Locate Document button which will display the page referred to.

NOTE: Within the Index, volume numbers appear first and are followed by page numbers.

See also :

 Navigating the CD-ROM using the tables of contents

 The Dictionary

 The Page Locator and Basic Search Dialogue Bar

 The Main Search Dialogue Box


 The Tables of Contents

When the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM application is first launched, you are presented with the contents page. This page can be brought to the top at any time by pressing the Table of Contents button on the toolbar.

The root table of contents to the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM is intended to mimic the structure of the original work. Ultimately, branching down the root table of contents will provide access to the first page of a particular volume, the first page of the Table of Contents to the particular volume or the list of illustrations (if there is one). Please note that in every case the tables of contents and lists of illustrations comprise several separate document pages in sequence. Immediate access to one of the above is expedited by clicking on a particular table of contents item twice in quick succession.

The root Contents page remains in view until you decide to close it by clicking once on the Table of Contents button on the toolbar.

The Contents pages of individual volumes are rich in information and well worth exploring. Consider, for example, Volume XXVI, Deucalion and other Studies in Rocks and Stones.

The Table of Contents, beginning on page ix, indicates, first, where you will find the preliminaries, paginated in lower-case Roman numerals: the List of Illustrations to the volume (page xiii) and E. T. Cook's useful Introduction (beginning on page xvii). The works on mineralogy and geology included in the volume are then listed in order of date, giving not only the page references for the texts of each work but also various ancillary material such as bibliographical notes by the editors, who indicate, for example, that the text of Ruskin's long paper on Banded and Brecciated Concretions begins on page 37, and is preceded by a detailed Bibliographical Note on page 36.

Following the listing of the main works in volume XXVI, the list of Contents gives page references for the letters, addresses and notes on mineralogy and geology included in the Appendix, again in order of date, beginning on page 545, and then for the two listings - of subjects and of minerals mentioned in this volume - in the subsequent Index, beginning on page 583. Finally, the editors helpfully provide page references to minor Ruskiniana - such as relevant extracts from Ruskin's diary, letters by Ruskin and his circle, and so on - in the volume. This is mainly material incorporated in the Introduction, so that Mr F. Wedmore's note on Ruskin as a Lecturer, for example, begins on page xlii.

Each of the 39 volumes comprising the Works of John Ruskin possesses its own table of contents and list of illustrations (if applicable) and in a large number of cases multiple tables of contents (that is, tables of contents to sub-sections or parts within one of the main volumes, referred to here as nested tables of contents).

Once you have displayed the table of contents for a specific volume you can access a specific page by clicking twice in quick succession on the item you wish to access.

The tables of contents for each volume (the nested tables of contents) are treated like document pages which means that they are shut down as you open new documents and up to five pages can be displayed simultaneously.

See also :

The General Index


 The Dictionary

Clicking once on the View Dictionary button on the toolbar ...

... opens a window containing an alphabetical listing of all unique terms in the database's index.

Next to each index term is a number which shows the number of times (known as postings ) the term occurs within the database. The Dictionary does not display stopwords (such as AND, THE etc.). To navigate the Dictionary use the blank entry box at the top of the Dictionary screen to key in either the stem of words you wish to browse or single letters.

The View Dictionary facility is useful for verifying the existence of and popularity of terms within the database; if a search for a particular word yields no hits, and you believe that the word is present in the database, the Dictionary facility can be used to confirm or refute this. The dictionary facility also shows what variants of a given word exists in the database and it can also be used to find common misspellings and inconsistencies either in the original work or in the re-keyed version.

You can use the Dictionary facility to check if a particular word would be a meaningful query term. If a word is shown to have an exceptionally large number of occurrences (postings) within the database (e.g. painters) it may be unsuitable as a query term because using it may cause an unfeasibly large number of documents to be retrieved.

If you activate the View Dictionary facility without first keying in a term or terms in the Main Search dialogue box then the dictionary file will open at the top of the file (at the letter A). If you key in a word or the stem of a word in either of the two search windows and open the dictionary file then it will start at the word or the stem of the word you have keyed. If you have keyed in several words in the Main Search Dialogue Box (e.g. Spain OR Germany OR Italy) and wish to browse the dictionary file for each of the three words then you must highlight each in turn using your mouse and then click on the View Dictionary buttons on either the Main Search Dialogue Box or the toolbar.

NOTE: You cannot navigate the Dictionary File using keyed query terms direct from the Input and Basic Search Bar at the bottom of the screen.

You can select several terms from the Dictionary file automatically by simply scrolling the list and highlighting words by pressing simultaneously your keyboard's Ctrl key and your left-hand mouse button and then double clicking on the last term you wish to copy into the Main Search Dialogue Box. To copy and paste a single term from the Dictionary file double click on the word using your left-hand mouse button.


The Main Search Template
 The Main Search Dialogue Box

Clicking on the Main Search button on the application's toolbar (right) displays a dialogue box similar to that shown below :

The Main Search Dialogue Box consists of three elements : a blank box into which search strategies can be keyed, five command buttons and five radio buttons with which you can restrict the domain of a search.

RESTRICTING A SEARCH

In contrast to the search facilities implemented on the basic search dialogue bar, it is possible to use the main search dialogue box to restrict a search to the various fields of the page, by clicking on any of the radio buttons to the right of the input box. In this way you can search the entire database, the main body of text of all 39 volumes, the titles only or just the footnotes. It is also possible to restrict a search to a particular volume by entering the number of the desired volume in the input box to the right of the Volume radio button.

THE VARIOUS SEARCH MODES

Each of the different command buttons beneath the input box allows you to utilise a different mode of inquiry. Click on an entry below to view details of their functions: -

 Perform Search

 View Dictionary File

 Fuzzy Matching

 Suggest Related Terms

See also :

Query Operators

Searching with Boolean Operators

Wildcard Searching


Running a Search
 Performing a Search

Clicking on the Search button on the main Search dialogue box is approximately equivalent to typing in a query in the basic search dialogue input bar and then clicking on the associated Search button. However, the advanced search facilities of the main search dialogue box enable you to restrict your search to the various search domains of the pages. The retrieval software will facilitate access to all occurrences of the specified terms and through the use of query operators, it is possible to perform more complex searches. (See below)

See also :

Query Operators

The Dictionary

Fuzzy Searching

The Relate Operator


 Query Operators

If you are familiar with the concept of full-text database searching then you will know all about query operators. If not, then you will need to know what they are and what they do. The next section provides guidance.

What is a query operator?

A query operator consists of one or more characters that act not as words which can be searched for but as instructions on how a query or search is to be processed. An operator works generally at word-level, where it applies to a single query term or at query-level, where its presence affects the processing of the entire query.

For information on the individual query operators, click on one of the links below :

Word-level Concept Searching

The Variants Operator

The Proximity Operator

The Adjacency Operator

The Near Operator


 Word Level Concept Searching

With the concept operator - the exclamation mark (!) - you can perform a concept search for an individual query word. The concept operator dynamically generates a list of terms statistically related to the word to which the operator has been appended. A search is then performed for the original query word and statistically the 20 most significant related terms.

Syntax:	word!
Example:	Florence!	In this example, concept searches will be performed on the word Florence.
See also :

The Proximity Operator

The Adjacency Operator

The Near Operator

The Variants Operator

The Relate Operator


The Variants Operator
 The Variants Operator (Word Level Fuzzy Searching)

Fuzzy searching allows you to search for terms having similar spelling. The VARIANTS operator can be helpful in finding word variants, inconsistencies or misspellings within the database. To use the VARIANTS operator, the first part of the word you wish to search for must be anchored with a tilde (~), character

Syntax:	string1~string2	where string1 is the part of the query term that must be matched exactly and string2 is the part that will be matched with similar spelling patterns.
Example:	Sie~na	This query will search for documents that contain a match for Siena or Sienna
Word-level Concept Searching

The Proximity Operator

The Adjacency Operator

The Near Operator


 The Proximity Operator

You can use the proximity operator to search for pairs or groups of words in which the second word of the pair occurs within a specified number of words after the first term.

Syntax:	word1 with/n word2	where n is the number of words within which word2 must occur after word1. the variable n can be any integer greater than 0 - within reason (the actual limit being 2,000 million). Stopwords and punctuation do not count as words in the range specified by n.
The proximity operator is unidirectional from left to right. It retrieves only records in which word2 occurs within n words after word. Occurrences of word1 within n words after word2 are not considered to be hits.

Example:	Turner with/6 Nottingham	This query will retrieve records in which Nottingham occurs within six words after Turner.
See also :

Word-level Concept Searching

The Variants Operator

The Adjacency Operator

The Near Operator


 The Adjacency Operator

The adjacency operator - ADJ - is equivalent to a proximity operator with a defined range of one word (i.e. with/1). Terms must appear in the text in the order in which they are entered into the Main Search Dialogue Box.

Syntax:	word1 ADJ word2
Examples:	water ADJ colour
The adjacency operator does not work across document boundaries.

The adjacency operator can also be set as the default search operator by selection in the Change Preferences window, accessible by clicking on the Change Preferences toolbar button.

In this way, searching for water colour would return all pages with the words water and colour adjacent and in the specified order.

See also :

Word-level Concept Searching

The Variants Operator

The Proximity Operator

The Near Operator


 The Near Operator

The near operator duplicates the functions of the proximity and adjacency operators, with one exception: it is bi-directional - you can use it to search for word pairs in which the second term occurs within a specified number of words before or after the first.

If you specify a word range with it, the near operator functions as a bi-directional proximity operator - see the proximity operator above. If no word range is specified, it serves as a bi-directional adjacency operator - see the adjacency operator above.

Syntax:	word1 NEAR/n word2
	word1 NEAR word2
Examples:	Lyons NEAR/6 Paris	This query will retrieve documents in which Lyons occurs within six words of Paris
	carefully NEAR considered	This query will retrieve documents in which carefully occurs immediately before or after considered.
See also :

Word-level Concept Searching

The Variants Operator

The Proximity Operator

The Adjacency Operator


 Searching Using Boolean Operators

The search software used on this CD-ROM supports the use of the Boolean Logical Operators AND, OR and NOT.

THE OR OPERATOR

The OR operator searches for documents that contain either of the words it separates.

Syntax:	word1 OR word2
Example:	Albrecht OR Albert	This query will retrieve any document that contains an occurrence of at least one of the two words.
THE AND OPERATOR

The AND operator searches for records that contain both of the words it separates.

Syntax:	word1 AND word2
Example:	Millais AND Ruskin	This query will retrieve only those documents (pages) that contain both terms, that is, in this case Millais and Ruskin.
The AND operator is employed as the default. Therefore, unless you change the default search operator by clicking on the Change Preferences toolbar button (right), it is not necessary to key the operator. Hence the searches Turner Ruskin and Turner AND Ruskin are equivalent.

THE NOT OPERATOR

The NOT operator searches for records which contain the first word of the specified pair but not the second.

Syntax:	word1 NOT word2
Example:	Cook NOT Wedderburn	This query will retrieve only those documents (pages) that contain the term Cook but not the term Wedderburn.
The NOT operator can only be used in a binary sense, i.e. a search phrase using the NOT operator must contain both a term to be retrieved and a condition under which that term will not be retrieved.

e.g.	the phrase Cook NOT Wedderburn is legal, whereas

the phrase NOT Wedderburn is not.

COMBINING BOOLEAN OPERATORS

Boolean operators can be combined into a single query. They can also be used along with other search operators such as NEAR or WITH.

Examples:	Caliban AND Prospero AND Tempest	This query will retrieve documents that contain the names Caliban and Prospero and Tempest.
	(Michael WITH Angelo) OR Michelangelo	This query will retrieve documents containing the name Michael Angelo (used throughout Ruskin's text) or Michelangelo (used occasionally in the editors' footnotes).
Several Boolean operators combined into a single query can be separated out into logical components by means of brackets. Brackets also serve to order the search sequentially.

Example:	(Millais AND (Rossetti OR (Holman Hunt)))


 Wildcard Operators

With wildcard operators you can search for words with variable characters. You can position wildcard operators at the beginning, middle or end of a query word, and you can combine them within a word (e.g. ?ffect*).

MATCHING A SINGLE CHARACTER

You can use the single character wildcard - the question mark (?) - to represent a single variable character in a query.

Syntax:	string?
	str?n?
	strin?
Examples:	medic???	This query will search for terms such as medicine and medicate.
	Fr?nc?	This query will search for terms such as France and French.
	imaginati??	This query will search for terms such as imagination and imaginative.
MATCHING A CHARACTER STRING

You can use the string wildcard - the asterisk (*) - to represent a variable string of zero or more characters in a query. The string wildcard is equivalent to an infinite series of adjacent optional wildcards.

Syntax:	string*
	string1*string2*
	*string
Examples:	medic*	This query will search for terms having a common root such as medical, medicine, medicate, medically, medication, etc.
	m*n	This query will search for words within a common beginning and end such as man, men mean, Meliboean, etc.
	*ane	This query will search for terms having a common ending, such as inane, insane, bane, sane etc.
	18*9	This query will search for terms such as 1819, 1829, 1839, 1849, 1859 etc.


 The Relate Operator

The RELATE function is used to identify potentially valuable query words which might not have occurred to you when you keyed in your original search.

The RELATE facility dynamically finds up to 40 words which are statistically related to the word or words which you have keyed into the search box. Words are deemed to be related if they exhibit a significant degree of co-occurrence with individual documents (pages).

To activate the RELATE function from the Main Search dialogue box, enter the word for which you would like to find related terms and then click on the Relate button :

The words which the relate function returns and displays in the "Related To :" window are ranked by their degree of co-occurrence. To copy a term from the "Related to : " window into the Main Search Dialogue Box, click on the term once and then click on the OK button. Below is an example of the words which the retrieval software has statistically related to the word "Ruskin".


 Fuzzy Matching

This identifies words having similar spelling . To activate the Fuzzy match facility you must key a term into the Main Search Dialogue Box and then click on the "FUZZY" button.

The Fuzzy match facility is particularly useful for finding word variants or common misspellings (given that the Works of John Ruskin has been keyed as a database there are likely to be some misspellings). Also, if you have doubts about the spelling of a word you wish to search for you can use the Fuzzy Match facility to verify it.

"Fuzzy" terms are returned in the "Variants of" window. To include a word returned by the Fuzzy Match facility, simultaneously hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard and click once using the left-hand mouse button on the desired term in the "Variants of" window.


 Printing and Saving Text and Images

PRINTING TEXT AND IMAGES

The PRINT function allows you to print the current document (the document which you have open). To print other documents simply click on the document window and then press the print button with your mouse.

The documents are printed out in the form in which they appear on screen, which includes any image present.

EXPORTING TEXT AND IMAGES

Document text can be saved in Rich Text Format (RTF) by pressing the download button on the toolbar which calls up a SAVE AS dialogue and allows you to save the current document (the one whose text window is highlight) to a directory of your choice with the extension *.RTF.

RTF (Rich Text Format) is a common typesetting language which word processing packages such as Microsoft Word and WordPerfect can handle. For example, you can import an RTF document straight into Microsoft Word and it will preserve the format of the original document and all embedded images.


 Screen Display Recommendations

It is recommended that if you are running the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM on a screen with an SVGA / 8514 screen driver at a resolution of 800 by 600 or 1024 by 768, then Small Fonts should be selected rather than Large Fonts to retain greater fidelity with the tabulation and formatting of Cook and Wedderburn's Library Edition.

To change to Small Fonts on a machine running Windows 3.1, click on Windows Setup in the Main program group in Program Manager ...

 ... and select Change System Settings... from the Options menu.


Viewing images using the Acrobat Reader
 Viewing Images with the Acrobat Reader

Full help for the handling of images in the Acrobat Reader can be accessed by pressing F1 when the Acrobat Reader application is active. Here follows a short description of the tools and buttons which you can use to manipulate the images within the Acrobat Reader.

THE ACROBAT READER TOOLBAR

The toolbar contains the following tools and buttons:

	Click the Page Only button to close the overview area of the window.
	Click the Bookmarks and Page button to open the overview area and display bookmarks created for the document. Click a bookmark's name to go to the location marked by that bookmark.
	Click the Thumbnails and Page button to open the overview area and display thumbnail images of each document page. Click a thumbnail to go to the page marked by that thumbnail. Thumbnails have been created for the few documents which contain more than one page of images, for example those pages of illustrations in Volume 23 between pages 466 and 467, which are represented by three Acrobat documents each containing three images. All documents will be initially displayed without thumbnails and with the whole image visible.
	Use the Hand tool to move a document page on-screen when it does not fit within the window. Drag the hand tool in the direction you want to move the page.
	Use the Zoom tools to magnify and reduce the page display by a factor of 2.
	Use the Select text tool to select text in a document, which can then be copied to the Clipboard using the Copy command.
	The Browse buttons advance the document to the first or last page of a document, or forward or back one page at a time.
	Use the Go Back and Go Forward buttons to retrace your steps in a document, moving to each view in the order visited.
	Click the Actual Size button to display the page at 100 percent.
	Click the Fit Page button to scale the page to fit within the window.
	Click the Fit Width button to scale the page width to fill the width of the window. Pressing this button and Control (Windows) key fills the window with only the visible text and graphics on the page.
	The Find tool searches for part of a word, a complete word, or multiple words in a document.
STATUS BAR FIELDS AND CONTROLS

The status bar contains the following fields and controls:

The window splitter adjusts the width of the overview and document areas. Drag the control to where you want to divide the two areas.

The page number box displays the current page number and lets you go to a specified page in a multi-page document. Click the page number box to display the Go to Page dialogue box.

The magnification box displays the current page magnification and lets you select various magnifications. Choose Other from the menu to display the Zoom To dialogue box.

RETURNING TO THE MAIN APPLICATION

To return to the main Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM application, double click on the Control Box of the Acrobat Reader.

Alternatively, choose EXIT from the File menu of the Acrobat Reader.


 Changing Preferences

By accessing the Change Preferences dialogue box via the relevant tool on the main menu bar, various out of the box default settings can be changed which allows you to customize the software according to your own requirements.

The following settings can be changed at any time and settings can be saved when you quit the application:

Switch stemming on or off (default is stemming = OFF)

Change default operator between AND, OR or ADJ (default = AND)

Turn on relevance ranking (default is document/database load order)

Windows position (default for this function = OFF)

Windows size (default for this function = OFF)

You can re-set the system to original defaults by clicking on the button labelled Defaults and save settings after quitting the application by clicking on the button labelled Save .

See also :

Finding Information

Screen Display Recommendations


 Additional Information on the CD-ROM

About this CD-ROM and copyright notices:

The Works of John Ruskin is published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK	Data is copyright The Ruskin Foundation, UK, 1996. All rights reserved.
_____________________

Interface software and CD-ROM development by MultiJac Ltd. Data display software is copyright 1995-96 MultiJac Ltd. http://www.hubcom.com/multijac	CPL text retrieval software and indexing programs copyright 1983-96 Personal Library Software Inc., USA. All rights reserved
_____________________

Adobe Acrobat and the Acrobat Reader copyright Adobe Systems Corporation 1987-95. All rights reserved	Microsoft Windows and Windows 95 are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation


 Keying Foreign or Special Characters

At times, when using any of the search facilities, it may be necessary to key in characters which do not feature on the standard English language keyboard, such as accented European letters. In order to search for these characters, adopt the following procedure :

Ensure that NUM LOCK is selected on your machine. If it is not selected, press the NUM LOCK button once. This button is usually situated above the Numeric Keypad to the right of your keyboard.

Hold down the ALT key and type 0 (zero) followed by the relevant ANSI Character Code (see below), ensuring that the ALT key remains depressed as you key this 3-digit code. All digits, including the initial zero must be keyed on the Numeric Keypad.

Once you have keyed the 3-digit code, release the ALT key and the required character will appear in the appropriate search template.

Code	Code	Code	Code

140	Œ	206	Î	223	ß	239	ï

156	œ	207	Ï	224	à	240	ð

192	À	208	Ð	225	á	241	ñ

193	Á	209	Ñ	226	â	242	ò

194	Â	210	Ò	227	ã	243	ó

195	Ã	211	Ó	228	ä	244	ô

196	Ä	212	Ô	229	å	245	õ

197	Æ	213	Õ	230	æ	246	ö

198	Æ	214	Ö	231	ç	248	ø

199	Ç	216	Ø	232	è	249	ù

200	È	217	Ù	233	é	250	ú

201	É	218	Ú	234	ê	251	û

202	Ê	219	Û	235	ë	252	ü

203	Ë	220	Ü	236	ì	253	ý

204	Ì	221	Ý	237	í	254	þ

205	Í	222	Þ	238	î	255	ÿ

Alternatively, you may find it easier to use Wildcard Characters in your search.

For example, to search for encyclopædia, you can key any of the following :

encyclop$dia

encyclop*dia

encyclop[ALT+0230]dia


 Known Problems

There follows a list of the known problems you may encounter while using The Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM.

The Text Retrieval software used in the Works of John Ruskin on CD-ROM will always obtain every reference to a desired term in the 39 volumes and list them in the Search Results window. However some users may find that terms will not always be highlighted within these pages. It must be stressed that all occurrences are nevertheless found and accessible.

Opening several hundred RTF documents requires vast memory usage. Some users have reported slightly impaired performance after opening around 200 pages. If you experience any problems opening documents, you are advised to restart Windows and then The Works of John Ruskin application.

The performance of the Acrobat Reader, which is used to display the full page and full colour images, can be adversely affected by certain video drivers.  It is strongly recommended that a standard SVGA driver running 256 colours should be used.

See also Keying Foreign or Special Characters


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 1)
 The Library Edition of The Works of John Ruskin

THE LIBRARY EDITION

OF THE WORKS OF JOHN RUSKIN

by James S. Dearden

Curator of the Ruskin Galleries, Bembridge School, and Brantwood.

This piece was originally written in 1980 as the introductory pamphlet to the Microfiche Edition of the Ruskin Library Edition published in 1986 in the Ruskin Research Series by Oxford Microform Publications, a member of the Pergamon Group. Pergamon subsequently sold their microfilm division to U.M.I., and during this change, the entire set of negatives for the project, together with the stock of the introductory pamphlet, were lost - without any copies of either having been sold. Thus, assuming that my own handful of copies of the Introduction is all now extant, this revised version was re-printed in The Book Collector, Vol. 44 No. 1, Spring 1995, to ensure a wider readership, and it is reproduced here, with minor revisions, by courtesy of the editor of The Book Collector.

In many books and articles devoted to Ruskin one finds that a very early footnote begins :

"The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London 1903-12, 39 volumes, hereafter referred to as Works..."

It is no exaggeration to say that without the Library Edition, detailed study of Ruskin would be impossible. Had not Cook and Wedderburn edited Ruskin's writings when they did, their successors in Ruskin studies would not now be able to do so, and the study of English Literature generally would be that much the poorer.

But Cook and Wedderburn were not the first to collect Ruskin. He had first been collected officially in what was known as the Works Series. This collected edition was published by Ruskin's publisher, George Allen, between 1871 and 1880; but the series was never completed and ran to only eleven volumes.

The first volume to be issued in the series was Sesame and Lilies, and in September 1872 the original Advertisement in which Ruskin had explained his resistance to discount bookselling was cancelled. The new cancelling slip explained the purpose of the Works Series:

"The series of which this volume forms a part, will contain all that I think useful of my former writings, so joined to my present work as to form a consistent course of teaching... "

1


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 2)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

The series was continued for several years, a number of the titles in the series going through more than one edition. Old and new titles were included and were evenly represented, but by no means all of Ruskin's books were included.

Of course several American publishers, notably John Wiley & Sons of New York, had issued pirated Complete Works series, but these too, despite their titles, were incomplete.

On the passage of the American Copyright Act, 1891, Charles E. Merrill & Co. of New York, in association with George Allen, brought out the first authorised American collected edition. The Brantwood Edition, as it was called, after Ruskin's home in the Lake District, comprised twenty-two volumes and all but the Poems volume had introductions by Charles Eliot Norton, who also included many extracts from his letters from Ruskin.

Ruskin died in January 1900. Under the terms of his will, drawn up many years earlier, his cousin Joan Severn, C.E. Norton, and his former Oxford pupil Alexander Wedderburn, were appointed literary executors. George Allen had been Ruskin's publisher since Ruskin revolutionized his publishing methods in 1871. Allen had an agreement with Ruskin whereby he seems to have taken a third of the profits. After Ruskin's death, this agreement continued. Under the terms of the will Wedderburn was to receive £100 per annum to supervise sales generally. He was also to receive one third of the profits from the sales of any books revised or edited by him. Thus, since Ruskin's books continued to sell well,- indeed his death had caused a temporary revival of interest in them - it was in everyone's interests to ensure that they continued to be available.

Wedderburn, by now a successful barrister and soon to become a King's Counsel, was quick to grasp the legal implications, and in March 1900 he called a meeting of the interested parties at his house at 47 Cadogan Place, SW. Wedderburn explained that in order to extend the copyrights it was necessary to bring out editions which, wherever possible, incorporated new material. He revealed that he personally owned one or two manuscripts; Allen stated that he too owned several.

2


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 1)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

Allen and Wedderburn must have had further meetings, the outcome of which was a plan to republish all of Ruskin's works in a Library Edition. Wedderburn told Norton of the scheme on 21 September 1900. The co-executor was unenthusiastic. As early as 1878 he had urged that when the time came Ruskin's heirs should burn his entire correspondence. He did not veto the new plan but he replied on 12 October that he objected to a complete collection of all the Ruskin miscellanea. In his opinion, he explained, Ruskin himself had published, or allowed to be published, far too much. He urged that some of the material should be jettisoned and outlined a twenty-one volume edition which would comprise all he considered important. Wedderburn was not to be diverted from his original concept and replied that it was the task of an editor to collect material, rather than to jettison it, adding that Allen and W. G. Collingwood agreed with this opinion.

Meanwhile an announcement in the Daily News of 26 June 1900 had already indicated to the public that Ruskin's literary executors had intimated their intention of the publication in due time of a selection of Ruskin's diaries and correspondence. They asked that originals or careful copies of letters be sent to George Allen's offices for copying.

"The executors hope that owners of letters will assist in this project in place of applying for permission for themselves to print single or groups of letters."

Collingwood (who had been quoted as being in agreement with Wedderburn's conception of the role of an editor) had been another Oxford pupil and had later become Ruskin's secretary, biographer and editor. He was the obvious person to undertake the task of editing the proposed Library Edition; he had already undertaken a great deal of necessary editorial work while preparing the various Ruskin volumes which he edited in the 1890s. However Collingwood saw the project merely as a money-making scheme for the Severns and Wedderburn, and declined to have any part in it.

Wedderburn's plan was an ambitious one with an estimated profit of £30,000. This would be divided evenly between Joan Severn, Wedderburn (who was entitled to a third share under the will) and George Allen who was entitled to the same proportion under the terms of his 1887 agreement. Joan was unhappy with her share and at the beginning of 1902 Norton wrote to her that Allen seemed...

"... to me grasping as usual. Between him and Wedderburn not much, I fear, will be left for you... A strong and efficient man is needed to deal with two such hard and gripe-all-characters."

3


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 4)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

However, the legal situation was clear and again Wedderburn was not to be diverted from his plan. The fact that Collingwood refused to be drawn into the scheme must have been a blow, but Wedderburn was fortunate in discovering that Edward Tyas Cook, who had until recently been editor of the Daily News and who had long had a deep knowledge of Ruskin's work, was prepared to help as co-editor. Co-editor is something of a misnomer; Cook was responsible for the bulk of the work. He became involved in the project early in 1902; ten years and thirty-nine volumes later and the Library Edition was finished. For his share of the work, Cook received £1500 and a gold ink well.

By early 1902 plans must have been well advanced. A special handmade Unbleached Arnold paper had been made. As its water mark it bore, in addition to its name, Ruskin's coat of arms adapted by W.H. Hooper with the mantling designed by Ruskin containing his motto To-Day repeated three times, and a monogram which could be read as either JR or JJR. The monogram is taken from a book label in a volume which once belonged to Ruskin's father. Altogether the edition was to use about 87 tons of the special paper, but no doubt more than this was made because it was also used for various other associated jobs. An article in Black and White for 24 May 1902 observed, :

"If [Allen's] purpose were merely a commercial one he might save on the cost of the paper alone no less than £2000 and yet provide good material... When the millions of contemporary books have crumbled into dust like the shoddy they are, the noble pages of the complete Ruskin will remain a monument to the craft of book-making."

Interestingly enough a special batch of Unbleached Arnold paper using the same combination of watermarks, though in smaller proportion and more neatly arranged, had already been made and used for the limited editions of Unto this Last, Of Kings Treasuries and Of Queens Gardens, which the Ballantyne Press printed for George Allen in 1902. Of Kings Treasuries and Of Queens Gardens, issued on 20 June 1902, were known as the Coronation Edition, because copies were presented to the King and Queen. Unto this Last was issued on 28 November. The circular heraldic motif in the watermark was repeated in gold blocking on the vellum bindings of the three volumes from the Ballantyne Press. The three volumes were designed to be uniform with the Kelmscott Press edition of The Nature of Gothic.

The Library Edition paper seems to have been first used for the Prospectus of that work which was issued in May 1902; but even at that stage the proposed composition of the various volumes was being revised. Although the Prospectus announced that Ruskin's poems would be printed in volume I or in a later volume, The Academy of 24 May 1902 explained that a separate volume would be devoted to the poems. If they had been included in volume I as originally intended, that volume would have bulked to over 1000 pages.

4


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 5)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

The provisional composition of the various volumes, as originally announced in the Prospectus, was as follows:

I	Early Writings	XVI	Oxford Lectures
II	Modern Painters	XVII	Oxford Lectures
III	Modern Painters	XVIII	Fors Clavigera
IV	Modern Painters	XIX	Fors Clavigera
V	Modern Painters	XX	North Italy
VI	Modern Painters	XXI	Deucalion
VII	Seven Lamps of Architecture	XXII	Proserpina
VIII	Stones of Venice	XXIII	Love's Meinie
IX	Stones of Venice	XXIV	Our Fathers Have told us
X	Stones of Venice	XXV	Bibliotheca Pastorum
XI	Lectures etc., 1854-9	XXVI	On the Old Road
XII	Works of Turner	XXVII	Arrows of the Chace
XIII	Elements of Drawing, Elements of Perspective, Laws of Fesole	XXVIII	Private Letters
XIV	Political Economy	XXIX	Praeterita & Dilecta
XV	Sesame & Lilies, Ethics of the Dust, Cestus of Aglaia, Crown of Wild Olive, Queen of the Air, Story of Arachne, Tortoise of Aegina	XXX	Ruskiniana, Bibliography, Index
In the event, there were many revisions to the original plan, made as the work continued.

In 1903 the editors hoped that the projected thirty volumes would all be published during the course of three years, but at the outset they had not appreciated the enormity of their undertaking. All of the available manuscript material was placed at Cook's disposal. The bulk of it of course was still at Brantwood, but other items, particularly letters, were in various other hands. Letters to the Press repeated the request for material in private hands to be loaned to the editors, implying at the same time that permission for independent publication would not be forthcoming. All the available material thus assembled was typed (some was even copied in long-hand) and bound in a series of volumes in dark red cloth. These volumes provided the basis of the material on which Cook worked, although it seems likely that the text of some of the books was set by the printers from earlier, duly edited, editions. These Cook and Wedderburn Transcripts now form a valuable mine of material in themselves, for some of the original material which they copied is now lost. The transcriptions of the private letters alone run to twenty-one volumes, from which the editors made their selection.

5


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 6)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

Cook and Wedderburn met on average twice a week to discuss progress. These meetings were always amicable and never once did they have a serious disagreement. Cook subsequently submitted to Wedderburn the way in which he proposed to use material, proofs also being passed by Cook to Wedderburn. At this period Cook's industry matched Ruskin s. Wedderburn said that his co-editor was the embodiment of quiet wisdom and most amazing industry. On a normal day, Cook worked on the Library Edition from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m.; after an hour for lunch he would work again from 2 p.m. until 7 p.m., then after dinner he would go to the Daily Chronicle offices where he was employed as a leader writer! In addition to this, Cook published many articles during the period, as well as writing his two-volume Life of Ruskin, 1911.

The printers of the Library Edition were the Ballantyne Press of Edinburgh, who had printed recently the three companion volumes to the Kelmscott Nature of Gothic, and previously other Ruskin editions for George Allen. In the course of producing the Library Edition 1800 lbs of ink and 9 tons of type were used, costing £1500. There were 990 full-page plates, of excellent quality, and over 100 facsimiles of manuscripts. The advertised cost of each volume, in its maroon Holliston cloth binding, was one guinea. Special bindings were available to order: half leather at £1 5s. 6d.; half Roxburgh morocco at £1 8s.; half polished Levant morocco at £1 11s. 6d. per volume. The volumes were not sold separately but subscribers could pay on the receipt of each volume. 2062 sets were printed, of which 2000 were for sale.

The volumes were issued in dust jackets of a grey-green silurian paper, printed on the front :

THE WORKS OF

JOHN RUSKIN

[circular shield motif]

The spine is printed :

THE WORKS

OF

RUSKIN

[rule]

LIBRARY EDITION

VOL. V

MODERN

PAINTERS

VOL. III

I cite the example of a jacket on an odd volume bought for the Ruskin Galleries at Bembridge School from a Welsh bookshop a number of years ago. There is also a badly damaged example of a jacket on an odd volume VI which was bought for the galleries in the late 1950s from Allen & Unwin.

As well as the normal edition, a number of sets were printed on a thinner paper. This is known as the India Paper issue, although not actually such. There is one set of this issue in the British Library; the Ashmolean Museum has another set.

A third set of India Paper issue was with the Hay Cinema Bookshop in the summer of 1986. This was a particularly fine set. Printed on India paper and with the illustrations mounted on Japanese vellum, the 39 volumes were bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe in full green morocco extra gilt and small red medallions with gilt floral motifs. Importantly, a letter from Joan Severn, dated 3 August 1916 was tipped into one of the volumes in which she certified that this set is one of twelve specially printed on India Paper.

6


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 7)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

In a personal letter to the writer in 1972, C. C. Kohler, antiquarian bookseller of Dorking, Surrey, reported an India paper set which he described as " ...in the original sections unsewn, preserved in original boxes." Of the boxes themselves he wrote :

 "The boxes would appear to have been made for the set though there is one curious point. All of the boxes except that for volume II have been made in blue paper covered board. The box for volume II is made of green cloth covered boards, much more substantial. The labels on this box are exactly the same as all the other labels."

There are two labels on each box. On the spine:

Ruskin

--

Library Edition

--

India-paper

Vol.

and on the lid,

The Works of

John Ruskin

Library Edition

Volume - India Paper.

The volume number has been entered by hand on each label. The set was subsequently described and offered in Mr Kohlers Catalogue 15, in autumn 1972.

When one considers the range of variations in the editions of Ruskins books which George Allen issued - large paper, small paper, hand- or machine-made paper and with a wealth of different styles of binding - it is not surprising that there was also a variant edition of the Library Edition. It is not clear whether or not the twelve India paper copies are included in the declared 2062 sets printed, but I see no reason to doubt Joan Severns word that twelve India paper sets were issued.

In due course the first volume was completed and it was published on 27 March 1903. But already the publishers were falling behind on their announced schedule of one volume per month. Volume II came out in May, III in July, etc. As clearly as can be ascertained, publication dates were as follows (where no publication date is known, the date of review in the quarterly St. George is indicated by an asterisk):

I	27 March 1903	XXI	April 1906*
II	1 May 1903	XXII	April 1906*
III	3 July 1903	XXIII	?11 June 1906
IV	2 September 1903	XXIV	?11 June 1906
V	October 1904*	XXV	?11 June 1906
VI	October 1904*	XXVI	?26 September 1906
VII	March 1905	XXVII	?26 April 1907
VIII	April 1904*	XXVIII	?26 April 1907
IX	April 1904*	XXIX	October 1907*
X	April 1904*	XXX	October 1907*
XI	April 1904*	XXXI	October 1907*
XII	October 1904*	XXXII	?
XIII	April 1905*	XXXIII	April 1908*
XIV	April 1905*	XXXIV	April 1908*
XV	April 1905*	XXXV	1908
XVI	20 January 1905	XXXVI	by March 1909
XVII	April 1906*	XXXVII	by March 1909
XVIII	April 1906*	XXXVIII	May 1912
XIX	April 1906*	XXXIX	May 1912
XX	April 1906*
7


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 8)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

For review purposes George Allen does not seem to have sent out the complete volumes. Instead he had extra sets of the Prelims of the various volumes run off, and these were distributed. These were put up in white paper covers lettered

The Works of

John Ruskin

Library Edition

Volume I [etc.]

Preliminary Matter, including

Bibliographical and Biographi-

cal Introduction, Contents, etc.

Copies of the Prelims for volumes XXVII and XXXI-XXXIX are in the collection at Bembridge. In the case of the two volumes of letters - XXXVI and XXXVII - the whole of each volume was printed on a cheap thin paper and issued for review purposes. Bembridge has volumes XXVI and XXXVII, in a half red calf binding, judged to be Wedderburns. Bound in are grey-green paper covers printed

The Letters of

John Ruskin

1827-1869 [or 1870-1889].

In volume XXXVI of this set the title pages [iii] and [vii] are printed in black only, whereas in volume XXXVII they are in red and black, conforming to the general edition.

Copies of the Prelims were also made available to certain people who had helped with the loan of material, or who had helped in other ways, as an exchange of letters in the Ruskin Galleries (Bem L65) between Juliet Morse, a keen Ruskinian and a Companion of Ruskin's Guild of St. George, and George Allen's son Hugh, shows.

On 30 March 1905 Juliet Morse wrote,

"I hope you will soon send me the "Prefaces" to see. I have looked over my papers and letters and I see that there is a good deal which, if you have not had it from other sources, which is probable, might be of value for the Prefaces of Vols dealing with 1871-1878 - and later... I should like to possess a series of the whole of the Prefaces, which are printed for Press purposes - Should you be willing to do this.

On 3 April Allen replied,

"I had delayed sending you the Introductions to "The Library Edition" as that to Vol. VII was only issued last week. This being Vol. V "Modern Painters" was delayed by its chronological order. As you are so kindly offering to send what I am sure will be interesting & of value for the Prefaces we are very pleased to send you them as far as possible. Unfortunately only a few were printed separately for "Press" purposes and I am only able to get those of Vols I and III as printed for the American Edition and the remainder for the English Edition, but none for Vol. II in a perfect condition but only as returned from the binder - being imperfect or damaged pages. Possibly you would prefer those of Vols I and III in the English setting complete but damaged pages. There is no difference except that this has the "Contents" and "Illustrations" which is omitted from the American ... Of course the remainder of Prefaces will be forwarded as issued ... "

8


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 9)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

Juliet Morse replied on 6 April 1905,

"I am most grateful to you for those deeply interesting prefaces or introductions. They are simply delightful to read ... About the introductions to Vols I and III I don't mind if they are American edition or English, so long as the information is fairly complete."

I have never seen copies of the American edition of the Prelims but as Allen explained, these omitted the lists of Contents and Illustrations, perhaps to save weight in their carriage, or for Customs reasons.

America was to cause other problems too. Co-literary executor C.E. Norton published a selection of the letters he had received from Ruskin, in a series of five articles in the Atlantic Monthly between May and September 1904. Later in the same year the Ruskin-Norton correspondence was published in two volumes by Houghton Mifflin & Co. of Cambridge, Mass. This act was at complete variance with Norton's opinion that too much Ruskin had been published already, and disregarded his co-executors' desire to hold new material for the Library Edition. It also presented the editors of the Library Edition with an added problem because they had already declared their intention of including everything that had hitherto been printed, whereas they would have been able to make selections from the unpublished letters. Norton's reason, stated in his edition, was that he was unwilling to entrust the task of selecting and editing the correspondence to anyone other than himself. Wedderburn promptly stopped the sale of the Houghton Mifflin edition in Great Britain since it had been published without his permission as literary trustee, and at the appropriate time, acid comments appeared in volume XXXVII, pp. 683-4.

By March 1907, when a new Prospectus was issued, twenty-seven volumes had been published. The case of the Norton letters, and other unforeseen problems, had led to a revision of the schedule of volumes; the 1907 Prospectus announced that the edition would be completed in thirty-eight volumes.

9


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 10)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

1907 was also noteworthy because it saw the expiration of the copyright of several of Ruskin's earlier books. This would lead to new editions coming from other publishers and in order to offset the effect of this, new steps were taken to publicise the Library Edition. In March and April 1907 an exhibition of 230 of Ruskin's watercolours and drawings was held at The Fine Art Society's Galleries in New Bond Street. The already published volumes were also on exhibition and could be examined, and the inside back cover of the exhibition catalogue was a Special Order Form . In addition a 14 pp. pamphlet, entitled :

THE

LIFE AND LETTERS

AND

COMPLETE WORKS

OF

RUSKIN

(LIBRARY EDITION)

which was illustrated by six engravings, was issued for distribution at the exhibition.

The exhibition was, in fact, a poorly disguised sale of Ruskin's drawings. The catalogue was prefaced by the note :

"The prices, which are net and in guineas, can be had on application."

In the Prefatory Note it was explained that plans for the complete edition had been in hand since Ruskin's death in 1900 and because drawings would be required for reproduction, none could be parted with, even to those most desirous of acquiring them. However, the approaching completion of the work meant that some drawings might now be sold! It was probably coincidence that later in the same year the lease of the Severns' house in Herne Hill expired and they bought a new house in Warwick Square not far from Victoria Station.

Later in the year George Allen was taken ill while on holiday in Scotland with his daughter Grace. They returned home to Orpington where he died on 5 September 1907 in his 76th year. His death however did not interrupt the publication of the Library Edition, for his agreement extended to his children Hugh, William and Grace, who had worked in the business with him, and who took over from him.

The firm continued as George Allen & Sons, with his children continuing to run the business for several years. The change in the firm's name is not reflected in the publisher's imprint in the Library Edition, which continued to appear as George Allen.

A Note to Subscribers issued in March 1908 announced that,

"It is now definitely ascertained that the Edition will not exceed the thirty-eight Volumes detailed in the latest prospectus.

Subscribers will appreciate the difficulty of estimating, in the first instance, the number of Volumes into which the complete Works of Ruskin would go. This difficulty has been increased, and the number of Volumes added to, by the publication by other persons, since the first prospectus, of a good deal of fresh matter, which the Editors, pledged to completeness, are bound to include.

The two Volumes of Ruskin's Letters to Mr Charles Eliot Norton (edited by the latter), and many other such collections, are responsible for one additional volume. Others are accounted for thus (as will be seen on referring to the prospectus of March 1903)..."

10


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 11)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

The note goes on to explain in detail how the inclusion of additional material had led to changes in the structure of the various volumes, and how the edition had increased beyond the originally estimated number :

"Thus nine are added and two saved, making in all an addition of seven - the difference between the lowest estimate of thirty-one (or thirty-two) in March 1903 (see pages 6 and 12 of that prospectus) and thirty-eight now announced.

Even so, a great many of the Volumes are individually far more bulky than was at all contemplated. But it must not be forgotten that the question has not been merely of addition for addition's sake: the result of striking new veins of literary wealth has brought to light material that was far too valuable to be thrown aside, in the numerous extracts from the Author's voluminous Diaries and Letters, which in themselves alone account for a good deal of the added bulk.

Thus the Editorial Introductions and Notes give the fullest life of Ruskin hitherto published. Should it happen - from some cause hitherto unforeseen - that another volume requires to be added to the Edition, it will be supplied free of charge to the subscribers. "

The speed of production was slowing down. Only volumes XXXIII to XXXV were published in 1908. The two volumes of letters, XXXVI and XXXVII, had appeared by March of the next year. The final two volumes - in the event there had to be an extra volume XXXIX which was issued free - were published in May 1912.

When one considers the wealth of bibliographical and other information in volume XXXVIII and the number of entries in the 689 pages of the final Index volume, it is not surprising that they took three years to produce.

In volume XXXVIII, the Catalogue of Manuscripts was prepared by Wedderburn, while in cataloguing the drawings Cook had the help of Hugh Allen. It is uncertain which of the two latter did the lion's share of cataloguing. In his Literary Recreations, 1919, Cook wrote :

"...of his drawings, the catalogue of which I compiled for the Library Edition ..."

while in 1913 Hugh Allen had written to C. R. Cookes (Bem L65),

 "... when I compiled the Catalogue of Ruskin Drawings issued in the last volume of the Library Edition !"

The work of preparing the massive and happily remarkably accurate Index was shared by three people. A Miss Slaughter undertook the initial preparation of index slips for hitherto unprinted matter, notes and introductions. Wedderburn indexed fifteen letters of the alphabet, with exceptions such as Art, Artists, Bible, etc., and Cook prepared the remainder. As early as 1909 he had indexed Colour, a task which alone had taken over a week.

11


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 12)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

Arthur and Joan Severn had already presented Cook with a gold ink stand as a mark of their appreciations by 1909. To mark the conclusion of the work on the edition, Wedderburn had a set specially bound for Cook in red morocco extra with gilt borders and gilt inside borders, single line gilt panel backs with gilt circle and shield on upper covers. Cook wrote thanking Wedderburn for ...

so magnificent a present. It will always remind me ... of our long association in this big piece of work - an association which has been so pleasant to me in every way. · .. The binder has carried out your magnificent instructions extremely well... the whole finish is charming. This, I foresee, will be the set I shall use."

This set was included in Quaritch's Catalogue 900 in 1970. The collection at Brantwood has recently been given a set which has pencilled in the front of volume I :

A. Wedderburn's set £30.

This set is bound by W.J. Mansell in half blue morocco with four raised bands and marbled boards, and has a small version of the circular heraldic motif blocked on the front pastedown of each volume. Interestingly, in this set, the motif in volume I has additional mantling around the shield, within the circular banner. This is not present in the other thirty-eight volumes, so two different dies were in use. In a set in a similar but half red morocco binding at Bembridge, the simpler die has been used in all thirty-nine volumes.

In June 1912, the month after the two final volumes of the Library Edition were published, Cook received a knighthood in recognition of his career in journalism; one likes to think that perhaps his work on the Library Edition was also taken into consideration. Five years later he was appointed a K.B.E.

At about this period the firm of George Allen was expanding. In 1909 they had bought the publishing branch of Bemrose & Sons, and at the same time they moved from their costly offices in Charing Cross Road to Rathbone Place, Oxford Street. Two years later they amalgamated with the old established publishing house of Swan Sonnenschein & Co. to become George Allen & Co. Ltd. But interest in Ruskin was waning, and the directors of the new company were not the astute business men that George Allen had been. In 1912 they sold the remaining unbound stock of the Library Edition to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Company. By 1913 the firm had run into financial difficulties and for a while it was run by a Receiver. Finally, on 4 August 1914 - the day on which World War I began - a new company was formed, with the directors of the old company together with Stanley Unwin establishing George Allen & Unwin Ltd. at Ruskin House, 40 Museum Street, WC.1. By this time, there were no members of the Allen family remaining in the company.

12


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 13)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

When the Encyclopaedia Britannica Co. bought the unbound sheets, Allen's son made a number of letters from Ruskin to his father available to the company. The sheets were put into a dark blue cloth binding with printed paper labels and the purchaser of each set was presented with a Ruskin letter preserved in a dark red morocco folder, lettered in gilt :

Original autograph letter

by

John Ruskin

presented with

The Library Edition

of

Ruskin's Works

1912.

This added incentive must have been responsible for a few more sales, but demand for the Library Edition melted away. Between the wars, and again after 1945, they were a drug on the market. Most antiquarian booksellers had a set taking up three yards of valuable shelf space and they were delighted to part with them for a nominal sum. Allen & Unwin were still advertising sets at £50 in 1953, but these were undoubtedly second-hand because it was Sir Stanley Unwin's habit, particularly in the years after the war, to buy any sets of the Library Edition that were either offered to him, or which he discovered on the market. This practice was probably discontinued in the early 1960s. The firm has no record of when the remaining new stock merged with the second-hand stock. With the revival of interest in Ruskin which has taken place in the past thirty years, there is once more a steady demand for the work and the second-hand price has risen sharply.

There are errors and omissions in the work. Helen Viljoen has pointed out many in her Ruskin's Scottish Heritage. It was the policy of the executors, if not the editors, to play down as much as possible Ruskin's marriage to Effie Gray and his love for Rose La Touche. There is clear evidence that Joan Severn and Sara Anderson kept certain material from Wedderburn. Then there are frequent minor errors in family names and dates. The editors seem to have readily accepted Ruskin's word on family history, rather than checking for themselves; now of course we know that he was autobiographically very inaccurate.

Nevertheless one can echo the words of The Scotsman which described the Library Edition as the most remarkable literary monument ever raised to any author. A bookseller's slip in my own set describes it as :

"Incontestably the noblest literary monument ever erected to a great man, and the best edited classic in all literature."

13


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 14)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

Speaking at the Ruskin Centenary Celebrations in 1919 Cook said,

"... in collaboration with my friend and colleague, Mr Wedderburn, I was engaged for many years in what a critic described as 'burying Ruskin securely under thirty-nine huge volumes'"

to which Wedderburn added :

"... I had the pleasure of presenting [a set of the Library Edition] to the library of a great institution - the Inner Temple. The other day the librarian said this to me: 'Very often a man comes to me and says 'Where can I find something on such and such a general topic?' and again and again I reply, 'You might look in the index to the Library Edition of Ruskin, you are very likely to find something of interest there'"

Sir Edward Cook died on 30 September 1919, the day before the opening of the Ruskin Centenary Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Alexander Wedderburn lived on until July 1931.

14


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 15)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

Cook and Wedderburn's collaboration on the Ruskin Library Edition resulted in more than the thirty-nine volumes themselves. During the course of their work they had assembled a substantial collection of books by and about Ruskin. They both had their personal collections; this was a joint working library and on completion of their task they appear to have given the collection to the Western Art Library of the Ashmolean Museum. Wedderburn's personal library was eventually dispersed and a number of volumes from it have found their way into the Ruskin collection at Bembridge. Some items from Cook's collection had also found their way into the Bembridge collection, while the remains of Cook's not insubstantial collection was finally dispersed by Bloomsbury Book Auctions on 13 February 1992. More of his books came to Bembridge at this time.

Of the volumes of transcripts of Ruskin papers made for Cook and Wedderburn, sixty-two volumes were given to the Bodleian Library by the Wedderburn family in 1936. Others had found their way to Bembridge, and a further group was bought for the Bembridge collection in about 1948 from an Edinburgh bookseller, bringing the holding of transcripts at Bembridge to twenty-nine volumes.

In addition to these collections of books, there were two other interesting and little-known by-products of the Library Edition, which were produced during the printing of the set.

The first volume of the Library Edition contains at pp. 265-85 Ruskin's "Essay on the Relative Dignity of the Studies of Painting and Music and the Advantages to be Derived from their Pursuit." He had written this essay in 1838 for Miss Charlotte Withers with whom he was at this time friendly. They had apparently discussed the relative merits of their own particular subjects and the essay was the outcome. The manuscript exists in two forms, the first draft and the fair copy. A few extracts from the first draft had been printed by W.G. Collingwood in his "Life and Work of John Ruskin", 1893, and by Mary Wakefield in her "Ruskin on Music", 1894, but neither version had been printed in toto until the fair copy appeared in volume I. The footnotes to the fair copy indicate the minor differences between that version and the first draft.

15


The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin (p. 16)
 The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin

Presumably, after volume I was printed, the type was corrected to conform to the first draft, the title was changed to that of the earlier version, and twelve copies were run off.

The title page is recast to :

Ruskin

Essay on the

Comparative Advantages of the

Studies of Music and Painting

(First Draft)

1838

Privately Printed

1903.

The Bibliographical Note on p. [2] is substantially the same as that in Library Edition I [266], though shorter. The twenty-page pamphlet, which has its own pagination, is printed on the usual Library Edition paper and is stitched into stiff hand-made paper covers lettered :

Ruskin

Essay on Music

and Painting.

There is no reference in the bibliographical note in Library Edition I [266] to this limited edition of the first draft, nor is it mentioned in the Bibliography in volume XXXVIII. Curiously, the Essay is followed in volume I by Leoni, in the bibliographical note to which Cook and Wedderburn first cast doubts on the origins of the series of Ruskin forgeries by T.J. Wise!

When preparing volumes XXXVI and XXXVII - the volumes of Ruskin letters - Cook and Wedderburn had a number of letters set in type which, for some obscure reason, were not used in these two volumes. There does not appear to be anything in the content of the letters which caused them to be excluded. Thus the only apparent reason is that of space, but under the circumstances this does not seem to be valid. While the type was still standing a few copies were run off, with the title:

Additional Letters

1827-1869 [or 1870-1889]

set up for, but crowded out of, Volume XXXVI

[or XXXVII].

The volume of Additional Letters has 128 pages. Page [I] is a half title, lettered as above. The letters themselves begin on p. 3 with a rhyming letter to John James Ruskin of 27 February 1836. Those excluded from volume XXXVI end on p. 118. Page [119] is a half title for the second part which begins on p. 121 with a letter to Joan Agnew [26 January 1870]. Pagination is consecutive throughout. Not all of the footnotes have been set, although provision has been made for them.

Volume XXXVI has 601 pages. Had the letters excluded from this volume been used, it would have brought the total number of pages up to 717, which in itself is less than the 739 pages in Volume XXXVII. Only eight pages were excluded from this latter volume, which seems to be a pointless reduction in size.

Probably only a few copies of Additional Letters were run off before the type was distributed, but exactly how many copies, remains in doubt.

16