Books

Signed limited edition, one of 1,500 sets signed by the author at the end of the new preface. This key text of the aesthetic movement was first published from 1851 to 1853. Its "obsession with the function and aesthetics of architecture, over and beyond its history and practice, again proved a revolutionary success" (PMM). The work's importance lies "in its celebration of the Byzantine and the Gothic, which had an immediate effect on Victorian architects, who began to introduce Romanesque forms and Venetian and Veronese colour and sculptural features into their designs" (ODNB). The most famous chapter, "The Nature of Gothic" (II, pp. 151-231), was twice separately reprinted in the author's lifetime, firstly for the inaguaration of the London Working Men's College in 1854, and secondly by William Morris in 1892. In this chapter, "Ruskin argued that under conditions of industrialization and the division of labour, social disharmony and industrial unrest were bound to occur, because the previously expressive craftsman - Ruskin's ideal working man - had been reduced to the condition of a machine" (ODNB). Grolier English 100, 92 (for first edition); Printing and the Mind of Man 315 (for Ruskin). Three vols, imperial octavo. Original brown cloth, gilt-lettered spines stamped with gilt devices and blind floral column, covers with rules and wide floral frame in blind enclosing gilt centrepiece, brick-red endpapers, top edges gilt, other edges untrimmed. With 53 captioned and tissue-guarded plates, including 5 chromolithographs by William Dickes, after Ruskin by Thomas Lupton, J. C. Armytage, R. P. Cuff, and others. Further illustrations in the text. Bookplate of Rev. Thomas Hardie Turnbull (1848-1894), Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and resident of Lesmahagow, on front pastedowns. Spines lightly sunned, spine ends bumped, wear to extremities, front inner hinge of vol. III partially cracked, remaining sound, sporadic internal foxing. A very good set.