"The Ring and the Book" was, by some margin, the best-selling of all Browning's works during his lifetime. The depth of its philosophical, psychological, and spiritual insight is a step up from anything Browning produced before or after, and the poem was almost universally hailed as a work of genius, restoring the pioneering reputation among the first rank of English poets which Browning had lost with "Sordello" nearly thirty years previously. The book lost popularity with readers during the 20th century; after its printing by Scribner's in the early twentieth-century, "The Ring and the Book" was printed by W. W. Norton & Company in the 1960s and 1970s. It is now currently available, though still difficult to acquire affordably or in a non-scholarly reading edition, by Broadview Press.