A full-size facsimile of John Ruskin’s as yet unpublished book of pressed plants with notes, collected and compiled by Ruskin during 1844 from the mountains and forests around Chamonix, France. This rare example of a herbier to be reproduced and published is accompanied with a second volume of notes and commentary. Here, Ruskin’s full, scientific explanations are fully commented on in the light of modern botanical knowledge. Professors David Ingram and Stephen Wildman provide an introduction, illuminating essays and detailed notes and commentary on Ruskin’s herbier.

'One of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.' William Morris, in the Preface. The Nature of Gothic started life as a chapter in Ruskin's masterwork, The Stones of Venice. Ruskin came to lament the 'Frankenstein monsters' of Victorian buildings with added Gothic which 'The Stones' inspired; but despite his misgivings the original moral purpose of his writing had not fallen on stony ground. The Nature of Gothic, the last chapter of the second volume, had marked his progression from art critic to social critic; in it he found the true seam of his thought, and it was quickly recognised for the revolutionary writing it was. As Morris himself put it, The Nature of Gothic 'pointed out a new road on which the world should travel'; and in its indictment of meaningless modern labour and its celebration of medieval architecture it could be called the foundation stone of Morris's aesthetic and purpose in life. 40 years after he first read it, Morris chose Ruskin's text for one of the first books to be published at his Kelmscott Press, using his own Golden type. It is one of the summits of his career, and one of the most beautiful books ever published. Few books can so completely sum up an era. The Kelmscott Nature of Gothic encapsulates the meeting of two remarkable minds and embodies their influence in word, image and design. But more than that, Ruskin's words are increasingly relevant for our times. In this facsimile edition, the first ever made of this rare book, the reader can fully appreciate their importance and their legacy, as understood by one of the most potent visual imaginations to have worked in Britain. In this enlarged edition, essays by leading scholars, Robert Hewison (who was one of Ruskin's successors as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University), Tony Pinkney (Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University) and Robert Brownell (lecturer, stained glass maker and author of Marriage of Inconvenience) explain the importance of this book for Ruskin, for Morris and for us today.

""I was determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book." --Gandhi on" Unto this Last"" One of the most influential political essays ever written, "Unto this Last "was one of the defining texts of British socialism and reading it was a decisive experience in the lives of Gandhi (who translated it into Gujarati) and Martin Luther King, among many others. Ruskin's lessons are as urgently needed today as ever, as his attack on the greed and short-termism of unbridled capitalism, and on the pursuit of money instead of true wealth, are every bit as inspiring and challenging as they were when it was published 150 years ago. A new introduction by Andrew Hill discusses the value of the essay in an age of credit crunch. A foreword by the Master of the Guild of St. George, Ruskin's association for social reform, sets out what Ruskinians today can do and are doing.

No figure among the Victorians surpasses John Ruskin in magnitude of genius, modernity of message, or mastery of prose. Yet for the first half-century after his death in 1900, his genius lay largely undiscovered. First published in 1963, John D. Rosenberg's The Genius of John Ruskin aimed to make Ruskin's ideas and writings accessible to the modern reader, and it quickly became a classic. Long out of print, this important anthology is now available with a new foreword by Herbert F. Tucker and an expanded and updated bibliography by the author that takes into account recent Ruskin scholarship.

The Stones of Venice has been described as the greatest guidebook ever written. Read by all who went there and thousands who did not, it opened Victorian eyes to the glories of a city even then under threat, and transformed the study and practice of architecture for ever. It took Ruskin almost half a million words to launch his devastating attack on the Renaissance – ‘the school which has conducted men’s inventive and constructional faculties from the Grand Canal to Gower Street’ and to explain how to see and make true architecture. They were ‘glorious words, but too many,’ as J. G. Links put it while preparing this edition. Links, himself the greatest exponent of Venice of the 20th century, designed this abridgement to convey all the excitement, urgency, love of Venice and unmatchedly beautiful prose to a new generation of readers. 

Never collected together before, this volume brings together all of Ruskin's writings about the Pre-Raphaelites, writings that helped turn this obscure movement into one of the most important movements in British art

Marcel Proust's fiction is threaded through with evidence of his belief in the importance of reading. A la recherche du temps perdu is rich with references to writers and books that were important to his own style of writing and to his approach to the world. By reading great authors, Proust contends, we not only learn of great ideas, but are enriched by the fruits of the world's most inspirational minds. In particular, Proust admired Ruskin, and in translating Ruskin's works into French, he provided copious annotations about the relationship between the writer and his readers. This book includes some of those annotations, along with a key Ruskin essay, 'Of Kings' Treasuries', and some of Proust's own writings about reading, collected in one volume for the first time.

Classic work by the great Victorian expresses his deepest convictions about the nature and role of architecture and its aesthetics. Timeless observations are required reading for architects, students and lovers of architecture. This authoritative edition includes reproductions of the 14 original plates of Ruskin's superb drawings of architectural details from such structures as the Doge's Palace in Venice, the Cathedral of St.-Lo, Giotto's Campanile in Florence and the Cathedral of Rouen.