content: The edition of "Jude the Obscure" that I believe you're seeing on this page -- the Signet paperback, with the two horses on the cover -- first came out in '61 and hasn't been touched since then (except to add a bibliography in 1980). There is a helpful 11-page afterword by Al Alvarez, but that's it. Signet has just been reissuing and reissuing the same thing for over four decades.With the Signet, though, there are no footnotes; you're just getting the bare text. That means that you'll have zero help with Hardy's rustic or ecclesiastical terms, not to mention the abundant Latin.In short, get this one:Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classic), in which said defect is remedied. And unlike the Signet, in which the text has adjusted to reflect modern spelling and pronunciation, the Oxford's World's Classics is Hardy's original text as he saw it published.