THE STONES OF VENICE John Ruskin J. G. Links (ed.) 1 873429 45 2 £9.95 272 pp illustrated with diagrams and sketches introduction index pbk 140 by 215mm portrait It is a book for the lover of architecture, the lover of Venice, the lover of lost causes... but, perhaps, above all, for the lover of fine writing. J. G. Links in his introduction 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 twentieth century, designed this abridgement to convey all the excitement, urgency, love of Venice and unmatchedly beautiful prose to a new generation of readers. John Ruskin (1819-1900), theorist and painter, was the greatest and most influential critic of the nineteenth century. His writings on art, architecture and social issues fill forty volumes, and eventually he collapsed through overwork. J. G. Links (1904-1997) author of Venice for Pleasure, surely the second greatest guidebook ever written after the Stones, was, together with his wife Mary Lutyens, an acknowledged authority on Ruskin and his circle. The choice of texts for this edition was made after a lifetime's immersion in the work of the master.