<head1>Library Edition
First complete collected edition of Ruskin's works (39 vols.); edited by <E. T. Cook> and <Alexander Wedderburn>; published 1903-12 by <George Allen>, who oversaw production and release of several volumes before his death in 1907.
	The Library Edition presented a significant departure from the first collected edition, the <Works Series>, which Ruskin dramatically limited in scope, since the new edition aspired to comprehensiveness. It collected all of the published works, along with a considerable extent of unpublished materials such as drafts, letters, diary extracts, etc.
	Motivations for comprehensiveness were both financial and philosophical. Wedderburn, as one of the three <literary trustees>, urged as early as March, 1900, following Ruskin's death in January, that copyrights of Ruskin's published books be extended by inclusion of new material. This would profit himself, who stood to gain by terms of Ruskin's will (see <Alexander Wedderburn>, and <George Allen>, who as publisher gained by terms of his former agreement with Ruskin. Of the two other trustees, Joan Severn, also looked forward to profit, while Charles Eliot Norton dissented, expressing a fundamentally different editorial philosophy from Wedderburn's. For Norton, guided by???? Ruskin's procedure in the <Works Series>, the editor's responsibility was to omit all materials except those he judged important and even to destroy manuscript materials that might prove damaging??? to a writer's reputation.
	<W. G. Collingwood>, who as editor of Poems (1891) had demonstrated editorial abilities, but who, unlike Wedderburn, gained nothing as an editor by terms of Ruskin's will, repudiated what he saw as Wedderburn's and the Severns' greed, while agreeing with Wedderburn in editorial philosophy. (Did he think a different kind of edition ought to be done?) This left Wedderburn, Allen, and Joan Severn as collaborators on the new edition, who projected a profit of £30,000 to be split as even thirds.
	Norton remained critical of what he saw as "gripe-all-characters" in Wedderburn and Allen (quoted in Dearden, "Library Edition of John Ruskin," 53), but he tended to exempt Joan Severn from greed, (because she was a woman?) For Allen, surely, the project represented not only new profits but also an opportunity for fine bookmaking. His first endeavor was to commission handmade paper watermarked with Ruskin's monogram and coat of arms, designed by W. H. Hooper ().
	With Collingwood distancing himself from the scheme, Wedderburn required a collaborator with editorial experience, whom he found in <E. T. Cook>. Although Cook was responsible for the greater part of editorial labor, Wedderburn always treated his coeditor with condescension, paying him £1,500 for ten years of scholarship.
	Cook worked from typed and longhand transcripts, bound in red cloth (now at Bodleian and RL), made by ?????????
	According to the "Publisher's Notice" announcing completion of the edition (where is this?), 2,062 sets were produced, with 2,000 for sale. Each volume in the standard maroon Holliston cloth cost 1 guinea (more for special bindings), which subscribers could pay on receipt of each volume, although separate volumes were not for sale apart from a set. By 1912, on completion of the series, sales had slowed sufficiently that remaining unbound sheets were sold to Encyclopedia Britannica, which issued sets in blue cloth along with the special incentive of a separately bound Ruskin letter (supplied by the Allen family). When George Allen & Company was reorganized as George Allen & Unwin in 1914 (see <George Allen>), remaining bound copies passed to the new company, which continued to sell them.
	
	The first two volumes containing Early Prose (vol. 1 []) and Poems (vol. 2 [1903]) were hurried along by Allen, concerned about perceived early default of subscriptions to the edition. He thus caused the editors, <Alexander Wedderburn> and <E. T. Cook> to be overly reliant on Allen's previously published editions of early works and, especially in the case of the early prose, to cobble together compilations of the earlier "editing." The Poems, too, shows the seams between reprinting Collingwood's Poems (1891) and the editors' expansions.

See Dearden, "Library Edition," and "Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin";