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THE KELMSCOTT PRESS

AND WILLIAM MORRIS

MASTER-CRAFTSMAN

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

(JJcM>c-ti^ yk-

C^fV>K7

THE KELMSCOTT PRESS
AND WILLIAM MORRIS
MASTER-CRAFTSMAN. BY
H; HALLIDAY SPARLING

FORSOOTH, BROTHERS, FELLOW-
SHIP IS HEAVEN, AND LACK OF
FELLOWSHIP IS HELL: FELLOW-
SHIP IS LIFE, AND LACK OF FELLOW-
SHIP IS DEATH : AND THE DEEDS
THAT YE DO UPON THE EARTH, IT
IS FOR FELLOWSHIP'S SAKE THAT
YE DO THEM, AND THE LIFE THAT
IS IN IT, THAT SHALL LIVE ON AND
ON FOR EVER, AND EACH ONE OF
YOU A PART OF IT, WHILE MANY
A MAN'S LIFE UPON THE EARTH
FROM THE EARTH SHALL WANE.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1924

5r13

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

This book is dedicated to the memory of William Morris,
and therefore bears no other inscription. Planned and written
as a contribution towards the understanding of his work and of
himself, it is based upon some ten years of intimate contact, and
of wholehearted participation in many of his activities.

Assistant-editor and then co-editor of the Commonweal-,
aiding him in dealing with his correspondence ; his companion
upon many journeys; proof-reader, secretary and general
handyman of the Kelmscott Press from its foundation until
1894; editing the History es of Troye, Reynard the Foxe, Godefrey
of Boloyne, and the unfinished Froissart, under his direction,
work upon the Froissart ending only with his death; an ador-
ing and eager disciple throughout, I may claim to be especially
qualified as an interpreter of his teaching.

My grateful thanks are due to his Trustees collectively
and Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell personally for their generous
permission to reprint the copyright matter which forms the
appendix; to Mr. Robert Steele for invaluable criticisms and
suggestions upon matters of fact or opinion; to Messrs.
C. T. Jacobi, late of the Chiswick Press, and Frank Cole-
brook, late of the Printing Times, for information or advice ;
to Mr. Horace Morgan, of Messrs. James Burn & Co., for
many kindly services ; to Miss Olive Percival, of Los Angeles,
for an unwearied and inspiring discussion of doubts and diffi-
culties; to Messrs. Joseph Batchelor & Sons, of Little Chart,
H. Band & Co., of Brentford, and W. J. Turney & Co., of
Stourbridge, for courteous replies to inquiries.

&4-IS-S%

It is but fair to add that, although I have untiringly sought
help upon all points from those best able to render it, and have
quoted freely from the writings of others, the responsibility
for any statement of fact or expression of opinion is entirely
mine. Regarding the book as my personal homage to William
Morris, and a part of my personal service to the cause for
which he worked and fought, wherever I have differed irrecon-
cilably from a friend or an authority I have taken my own road.

For two reasons, one determined by feeling and the other
by convenience, nobody has been "mistered" in the body of
this book. To be mentioned in connexion with the Kelmscott
Press or with William Morris is, in so far and in my eyes, to be
immortalized, and therefore to be spoken of by an unadorned
name. Then, to have maintained a conscious watchfulness
for an artificial distinction between the dead and the living,
or the degrees of social standing, might only too easily have
detracted from due attention to points of infinitely greater
importance.

By an undesigned coincidence, this preface, which com-
pletes the book, has been written on the ninetieth anniversary
of William Morris's birth at Walthamstow, March 24th,
1834. Prosit omen!

H. HALLIDAY SPARLING.

CONTENTS

I. THE IDEA TAKES FORM
II. PRINTING IN l888 .

III. MORRIS IN l888

IV. APPRENTICESHIP
V. PREPARATION

VI. THE MASTER-PRINTER
VII. BOOKS PRINTED
VIII. ACHIEVEMENT
EPILOGUE

30
48

91
114

132

APPENDIX

A NOTE ON HIS AIMS IN FOUNDING THE KELMSCOTT

PRESS. BY WILLIAM MORRIS . . . 1 35

A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE KELMSCOTT PRESS. BY

S. C. COCKERELL ..... I39

AN ANNOTATED LIST OF THE BOOKS PRINTED AT THE

PRESS. BY S. C. COCKERELL . . . I48

VARIOUS LISTS, LEAFLETS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

PRINTED AT THE KELMSCOTT PRESS . . I72

INDEX

175

Vll

LIST OF PLATES

TO FACE

Portrait of William Morris .... Frontispiece
r. The " Golden " Type: a page from News from Nozvhere . 8

2. The " Troye " Type. The " Chaucer " Type . . .16

3. From the engraved Titlepage for Syr Tsambrace, 1897: Border by

William Morris. Picture by Sir E. Burne-Jones. Engraved on
wood by W. H. Hooper . . . . . .25

4. Frontispiece to A Dream of John Ball by William Morris. Drawn

by E. Burne-Jones. Engraved by W. H. Hooper. Border by
Morris . . . . . . . .32

5. Frontispiece to News from Nowhere by William Morris: Kelmscott

Manor, Oxfordshire. Drawn by C. M. Gere. Engraved by W.

H. Hooper. Border by Morris ..... 40

6. Frontispiece to A Tale of the Emperor Coustans Done out of the

Ancient French by William Morris. Drawn by Morris. En-
graved by W. H. Hooper ...... 48

7. From William Morris's Drawing for engraved Titlepage for Maud

for the Kelmscott Press, 1893 . . . . -57

8. An Initial Word from the Chaucer ..... 64

9. Chaucer and the Birds. From the first page of Chaucer's Works.

Drawn by Sir E. Burne-Jones. Engraved by W. H. Hooper . 72

10. Colophon for Quarto Books of the Kelmscott Press. . . 80

1 1 . Initial Word for The Water of the Wondrous Isles by William

Morris. One of the last two designs made by Morris shortly
before his death . . . . . . .88

The First Colophon ...... 88

12. Italian Humanistic Calligraphy, Fifteenth Century . . . 96

13. Type of Nicholas Jenson: Gloria Mulierum, Venice [1471] . 104
Type of Jacques Le Rouge: Aretino, Lionardo; Historia del Popolo

Fiorentino, Florence, 1476 . . . . .104

14. Type of SchoefFer: Biblia Latina, Mainz, 1472 . . .112
Type of Gunther Zainer, Augsburg, 147 1: Speculum Vitae

Humanae, 1471 . . . . . .112

15. Facsimile of a page of Morris's Manuscript for the proposed

Edition of Froissart . . . . . . .120

16. Facsimile of Morris's Verses for Embroidered Hangings for his

Bed at Kelmscott . . . . . . .128

THE IDEA TAKES FORM

Born into a world that in most respects has been transformed,
very largely through the work and influence of William
Morris, the reader or student of to-day does not always find it
easy to realize the full greatness of the man, or to measure the
effect he produced upon the world as he found it. All the less
easy because "in the study of this variant mind, always mani-
fold and always one, he that runs may not read," and in these
days we far too usually read at a run.

It is impossible to compare Morris with any other man of
his own time, or of any other time, indeed, in the world's his-
tory. It has not been given to many men of any time to be
masters of more than one art, and those that have been true
masters of one only are none too numerous. But Morris was
master of many, practising them all at the same time and to-
gether; and those whose knowledge and understanding are
confined within the limits of any one art, or any one craft, are
not only incapable of comprehending the Master-Craftsman
who "set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler
up to the epic," but, in proportion to the narrowing of their in-
terests and experience, are puzzled and worried by his output
in the one field of activity with which they are acquainted. His
poetry is not as that of others, nor his prose, nor his designs,
nor anything else that is his, because he recognized and felt the
underlying unity of all creative work, and could utilize the
skill and experience gained in the pursuit of any one art in the
pursuit of any other.

A few years later on, when the men and things of the imme-
diate past have taken their due place in historical perspective,

I B

when the passions of yesterday have cooled and the preju-
dices of to-day have diminished, Morris will begin to loom
up into something like his real size. The tyrannous reign of
the specialist — the "nothing-but," as Morris called him — will
then, it is to be hoped, be over; and the work that Morris did
may be more correctly estimated, each and every one of his
achievements being reckoned as part of an organic whole, the
work of Rossetti's "one vast Morris." He will no longer be
regarded as a poet who strayed into the making of wallpapers,
an artist who wasted himself upon the dyeing of silks and the
weaving of carpets, or as a genius who lost grip upon reality and
wandered offinto a wilderness of Utopian dreams.

He will be recognized for what he was, one of the great
men, and not far from the greatest, of his time; some of us
think of all time. He has not only bequeathed us an enormous
heritage of material and spiritual beauty, but has conditioned
our thinking in matters of art to a degree that is comparable
only to the conditioning of our thought in matters of science
by Darwin. Darwin has been belittled by the little-mindedand
abused by the obscurantist, as has Morris, but the immortality
of both is assured. Science must reckon with Darwin and art
with Morris until the brain of Man is for ever at rest and his
heart no longer beats.

Though this book is essentially concerned with but one,
and that the latest, of all Morris's activities, in order to under-
stand that one we shall have to take note of the others to some
extent, accepting the risk of digression and repetition in our
search for the truth of things; for Morris the Master-Printer
was but a phase of Morris the Master-Craftsman, and the one
is unintelligible unless and until the other be understood.

Book-printing as an activity to be studied or pursued did
not attract him until 1 8 8 8, in the fifty-fourth year of his life and
the thirty-first of his working career. That he had an eye for a
comely book, printed or manuscript, from the first, is proven
by some of the purchases he made while still a youth ; and when
he founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in i 856, he
entrusted its printing to Charles Whittingham II. at the Chis-
wick Press. Now that we have seen what he did himself in
the way of book-printing, thirty years later, the get-up of the
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine looks funny enough, with its

"typographical" borders to the wrappers, the "dropped head"
on the first page of each number, filled with one of the orna-
ments designed some years before by Charles Whittingham's
daughters, Charlotte and Elizabeth, and engraved by Mary
Byfield. In the first and second numbers, but not in the suc-
ceeding ones, there is a decorative initial to the first article, due
to the same artists. In our eyes of to-day, the whole effect is
decidedly quaint, but it was a long way above the level of its
time, and, remembering what the mass of current magazines
are like, one would hesitate before saying that it was not above
the level of ours.

Two years later, after he had left Oxford and was living
in Red Lion Square, where he and Edward Burne-Jones in
partnership had taken the house previously occupied by
Rossetti, he went again to the Chiswick Press for the printing
of his Defence of Guenevere. The get-up of this, his first book,
suggests that of the magazine, and it is ornamented after much
the same fashion. Nine busy years went by before his next
book, the Life and Death of Jason, was printed by the Chiswick
Press and published on commission by Bell & Daldy, as the
magazine and Guenevere had been. There are no ornaments
in the Jason.

Up to this time, 1867, Morris had paid for and looked
after the printing of his own books, but Jason sold so well that
Bell & Daldy offered him a fixed sum for the right to print a
second, and afterwards a third, edition on their own account in
the ordinary way. In the following year, F. S. Ellis, then in
business as bookseller and publisher, took over the publishing
of his books, and inaugurated the warm friendship which
lasted until Morris's death. Henceforth, up to 1888, Morris
took no more interest in the printing of his books than does the
average author, and in no case do they rise above a respectable
mediocrity.

Had conditions been more favourable, however, he would
already have done something towards bringing about the im-
provement in book-printing eventually realized by theKelms-
cott Press. An edition of the Earthly Paradise, then being
written, was planned by him in 1 8 66. This was to have been in
double-column folio, full of pictures by Burne-Jones, and very
much better got up and printed than any of the books then

current. More than forty blocks were engraved for this before
the project was dropped, some thirty-five of them by Morris
himself. Specimen pages were set up at the Chiswick Press;
one of them in a Caslon old-face, and the other in the "Basel"
type afterwards used for the House of the Wolfings in 1889,
and to be described in that connexion. But in 1866 even the
component poems of the Earthly Paradise had by no means
assumed their definite shape, nor those to be included or
laid aside been settled upon. Then, Morris & Co. had been
founded in 1861, with a scant capital, mainly provided by
Morris; and in 1 865 the downfall of certain inherited invest-
ments had very greatly reduced Morris's income, forcing him
to part with his famous Red House at Upton in Kent, as well
as compelling him to put the greater part of his energies into
building up Morris & Co. as a money-earning business.

About 1 87 1 he showed that his interest in book-printing
had not altogether died out, by projecting a finely-printed
illustrated edition of Love is Enough. Nothing more was
done, however, than designing and engraving some of the
ornaments. Two initials and seven marginal decorations were
designed and engraved by Morris, who also engraved a mar-
ginal decoration designed by Burne-Jones. A frontispiece
designed by Burne-Jones remained uncut until 1897, when it
was engraved by W. H. Hooper, and utilized on the last page
of the Kelmscott Press edition of the poem.

Both schemes, that of 1 8 6 6 and that of 1 8 7 1 , would appear
to have been conceived and approached from the standpoint of
ornament and illustration, with little or no real thought as to
the typographical side of the matter. So far as he could recall in
after years, it did not occur to Morris to go beyond the types,
paper and presswork then available, unsatisfactory as he found
these to be for his purpose, or to do otherwise than to drop the
work altogether when he discovered that conditions were so
strongly against him. Money lacked, if nothing else, for ex-
periments made "on his own," and his working-time was fully
taken up with Morris & Co. and the wares they produced,
which entailed upon him the study and practice of an ever-in-
creasing number of crafts. He took refuge in calligraphy and
illumination, transcribing and ornamenting favourite poems
or poems of his own at odd hours and on Sundays, either as

gifts to specially favoured friends or for sheer enjoyment of the
work. One of his manuscripts, a Rubaiyat on vellum, is in the
British Museum; another, on paper, containing translations
from the Icelandic, is in the Fitzwilliam.

To wonder at his not being ready to do in 1 8 7 1 what he did
in 1 89 1 is to ignore not only the many undertakings to which
he already stood committed, but the immense and many-sided
work done by him in the interval, as well as the vital fact that
he was a learner to the end of his life, learning from actual
working experience even more than from observation and
wide reading as he went along. Quite naturally, he did not then
possess the more assured knowledge, the wider vision and
keener insight, the richer technical experience and masterly
skill of eye and hand, that were his in 1 89 1 as the result of un-
tiring work in a score of differing fields. It was the time spent
by him at the dye-vat and the drawing-board, the loom and the
glass-furnace, in the printing-shed for chintzes or wallpapers,
in the workshop of the cabinetmaker, at his work-table ascalli-
grapher, designer, illuminator, draughtsman, wood-engraver,
which prepared and enabled him to become the Master-
Printer of 1 89 1— 1896.

That even so late as 1 8 8 6 he felt no personal call towards
printing, or, at any rate, took no very great concern in it, is
clear from what happened when the printing of the Common-
weal was under discussion by the Executive of the Socialist
League in that year. Hitherto, the paper had been set up and
printed "out," but was henceforth to be set up and made ready
in its own office, going "out" only to be machined.

Less than three years later, Morris would certainly have
had a good deal to say as to type and get-up and so on ; but as
things were, when Thomas Binning — who was to be foreman
printer on the Commonweal, and later on to be father of the
chapel at the Kelmscott Press — proposed that the paper be
set in a "modern" type, Morris allowed the proposal to pass
without a murmur as member of the Executive, nor did he
complain of the choice in private. Indeed, from first to last, I
cannot recall a single instance in which he interested himself in
the printing of any pamphlet, leaflet, or anything else issued by
the League; and the only ornaments used in League publica-
tions were due to Walter Crane. Even the decorative heading

of the Commonweal, attributed to Morris by Buxton Forman
and others, was not his at all, having been designed and en-
graved by George F. Campfield, who presented the block to
the League in token of sympathy and support.

Morris's attitude towards another proposal of Binning's in
the course of the same discussion — to adopt the "new" or, as it
was then called, "Americanized" spelling — was very different ;
and the fieriness of his opposition upon this point throws his
acquiescence upon the other into striking relief. Because of
my supporting Binning, though half-heartedly and through
a juvenile desire to be up-to-date, I heard of my "damnable
pedantry" in consenting to drop the u from "labour," thereby
obscuring the history of the word, which came into Eng-
lish from the French, and not directly from the Latin ; of my
"unforgivable ignorance" in doing the like for "neighbour,"
where it was the o that was intrusive; and, finally, of my "in-
curable stupidity and blindness" in failing to recognize that
the eye picks up a word as a recognizable whole, and that, so
long as the word is recognizable as an entity, not confu sable
with another, exactitude of spelling is an academic formality.

Not that the superficial ferocity of expression is to be taken
too seriously; for Morris's flare-ups were usually as passing
and harmless as those of gunpowder lighted in the open ; they
were over and done with in an instant, leaving no slightest
remnant of irritation or constraint upon his mind or his man-
ner. Once, after a similar outburst had ruffled my callow
dignity, he explained that "when a fellow damns your eyes, it
only means, after all, that he disagrees with you for the mo-
ment!" Sometimes, of course, he was really and justifiably
angry; but, even then, he was immediately repentant when the
storm had passed. After an encounter with a well-known art-
critic, during which he had said rather more than he meant, and
far more strongly than he cared to remember, he self-accus-
ingly commented that "a fellow ought always to be ashamed
of losing his temper . . . especially with a hen-headed idiot like
that\"

Not only with regard to his "rages," as they have been
written of by the uninstructed, has he been a victim of the
tendency towards repeating a story with verbal accuracy while
conveying an entirely false impression of its meaning. Thus

Rossetti's remark that he "never gives a penny to a beggar"has
been cited as proof that he was mean, though it was intended
to imply the very opposite failing. Again, it is recorded that
the talk having turned upon the laureateship, just after Tenny-
son's death, Morris insisted upon the then Marquis of Lome
as being the fittest man for the appointment; and this has been
quotedin proof of hisadmiration forthepoet insteadof his con-
tempt for the post. Those who were present can still chuckle
over the riotous drollery with which he pictured himself as a
flunkey, "sitting down in crimson plush breeches and white
silk stockings to write birthday odes in honourof all the bloom-
ing little Guelphlings and Battenbergs that happen to come
along!"

Returning to the Commonweal, his indifference with regard
to its printing, or that of his own books between 1868 and
1888, must not be taken to mean that at any time in his life he
was insensible to the charm of a well-written manuscript or a
well-printed book. But for fully twenty years he seems to have
taken for granted that book-printing as an art was dead, and,
except for the evanescent project with regard to Love is Enough
in 1 870, to have experienced no personal call to revive it. In
this connexion, the quantity and variety of the work that filled
and overfilled his days must again be emphasized, as well as the
fact that he never went outside of the day's work to look for a
new technique to be studied. Stained glass, tiles, wallpapers,
figured silks, printed cottons, carpets, embroideries, tapes-
tries, furniture, were among but far from all the things he de-
signed and wrought at with his own hands, because there was
a need for his doing so; and each main craft led him into sub-
sidiary or tributary crafts beyond naming, always through
some workaday demand or difficulty, in some way to be met or
overcome by him alone.

Add his productiveness as poet and prose writer, his ubi-
quity as lecturer for the causes that came near his heart, allow
for an occasional rare day of comparative relaxation ; and the
wonder then is, not that printing came so late as 1888 within
the scope of his activities, but that it ever came there at all.

That it ever did come there was almost entirely due to
Emery Walker, an eager and lifelong student of typography,
and one of Morris's most intimate friends from 1884 until the

end. That it should come when it did was determined by the
holding of the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition. A few good
examples of the best class of commercial printing were there
shown ; but, out of the long list of Morris's own works, not one
was felt by him to be worthy of inclusion. Printing stood con-
spicuously alone among the arts and crafts which are concerned
with daily life in a domestic interior as being unrepresented by
any example of things "you know to be useful and believe to be
beautiful," either produced by himself or under his direct in-
fluence. This was for him not only regrettable in itself, but in
connexion with his own books a reproach.

Among the illustrated lectures delivered at the Exhibition
Was one on "Printing" by Emery Walker, which he talked
over with Morris while preparing the slides for it. This en-
tailed a careful examination of incunabula, of manuscripts that
had been or might have been taken for models by the earlier
printers, as well as later examples of what ought or ought not
to have been done, and lengthy discussion of all the factors
which tell for beauty or the reverse in a printed book.

November 15, 1888, then, the date of this lecture, may be
taken as the first certain date in the history of the Kelmscott
Press, as it was that on which Morris resolved upon designing
and possessing a fount of his own. It is true that he had already,
and more than once, during his talks with Walker, expressed a
desire to "have a shot" at this, an intention "one of these days"
to "see what can be done." But the desire now hardened into
a definite purpose, and the intention into a determination to
begin at once.

His one remaining doubt was upon the point of cost ; as to
whether he could afford the expense of making the experiment.
At the time and until November 1 8 90, he was finding several
hundreds of pounds a year for the maintenance of the Common-
weal, and had as yet no idea of selling any copies of the book or
books to be printed, nor did that idea occur to him at all until
it was forced upon him from the outside, as will be told in its
place. The new project presented itself and appealed to him
as an endeavour, to be made by him and at his own charge, to re-
attain a long-lost standard of craftsmanship in book-printing.
Nor had he got so far as to think of having anything nearer to
a press of his own than a composing-room, in which the type

The Love friend, this is what I came out for to see : this many •
of the Earth gabled old house built by the simple country-folk
ofthelong'pasttimes,regardlessofalltheturmoil
that was goingon in cities andcourts,is lovelystill
amidst all the Leauty which these latter days have
created; & I do not wonder at our friends tending
it carefully and makingmuch of it. It seems tome
as if it had waited for these happy days, and held
in it the gathered crumbs of happiness of the con^
fused and turbulent past/' C S>he led me up close
to the house, and laid her shapely sun^browned
hand and arm onthelichened wallas if to embrace
it, and cried out: " O me ! O me ! How I love the
earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things
that deal with it, & all that grows out of it, as this
has done 1" CI could not answer her, or say a word.
Her exultation and pleasure were so keen and ex'
quisite, & her beauty, so delicate, yet so interfused
with energy, expressed it so fully, that any added
word would have been commonplace and futile.
I dreaded lest the others should come in suddenly
and break the spell she had cast about me; but we
stood there a while by the corner of the big gable
of the house, and no one came. I heard the merry
voices some way off presently, & knew that they
were goingalong the river to the greatmeadowon
the other side of the house and garden. C We drew
back a little, & looked up at the house : the door and
the windows were open to the fragrant sun-cured
air; from the upper window-sills hung festoons of
292

the "golden" type: a page from "news from nowhere"

might be set up and imposed, the formes then going to Emery
Walker's offices, at No. 1 6 Clifford's Inn, to be printed from.
His one doubt was at an end when Walker had made or ob-
tained a detailed estimate, and he found that he might hope to
produce and enjoy a "decent-seeming" book, having enough
copies for distribution among a few chosen friends, at the ap-
proximate cost of one copy of "a book worth looking at" — i.e.
one of the finer incunabula — though the prices then fetched
by such things were far from those to which they now run.

With Emery Walker's ungrudging aid, he immediately
entered upon an intensive study of old models, and also of the
technique of book-printing. For a deeper and readier grasp of
the latter than can be reached by most men in a lifetime, he had
been prepared by his long working experience in the printing
of wallpapers and fabrics, while his friend and mentor was the
best helper he could possibly have found in the world. Then,
the penman's eye was his, as well as that of the designer and
skilled craftsman. It need hardly be said that he went to the
very root of the matter, giving as much assiduity and care to
examining and considering the finest manuscripts and their
handwriting as he gave to the incunabula and their types.

He had often bought such things in the past, but was not in
the least a "collector," and had parted with most of them in
order to find money for the Commonweal and for the Socialist
movement as a whole, retaining no more than a favoured few,
valued for their intrinsic interest as much as for their pleasant-
ness to the eye. But he now began to buy both manuscripts
and printed books for their beauty and technical perfection,
their worth to him as good exemplars of those merits at which
he intended to aim in his own work. During the remainder of
his life, he formed in this way a splendid collection which un-
happily was more or less dispersed after his death; not en-
tirely so, for a great part of it passed into the Pierpont Morgan
Library, now one of the public treasures of the City of New
York.

No matter how enthusiastic or deeply stirred he might be,
he was not the man to rush things when work was in question,
or to enter upon an untried field without the most conscien-
tious research and preparation. A full year of inquiry and
experiment was to be spent before he addressed himself to the

task of type-designing, to that of papermaking, and so on, de-
liberately and with due trust in his command of material and
method. Work was too sacred in his eyes to be undertaken
until it could be well done, done steadily, with hand and tools
under full control and the end clearly in view.

For hasty work, or work done erratically on the plea that
it was "inspirational," he had nothing but distrust and con-
tempt. "Waiting for inspiration, rushing things in reliance
upon inspiration, and all the rest of it, are a lazy man's habits.
Get the bones of the work well into your head, and the tools
well into your hand, and get on with your job, and the inspira-
tion will come to you — if you're worth a tinker's damn as an
artist, that is!" His definition of an artist being: "A chap who
can keep his eye in the boat, and let his hand think for him."
At another time he said : " It is only an apprentice or a botcher
who has to think of the how, or worry about what one calls tech-
nique. The master of any trade can keep his eye on the work,
what he wants to do, and leave his hand to get it out. He has it in
his mind's eye clearly enough, but when it is finished, his hand
has put a lot of things into it that his mind never thought of.
That is exactly where inspiration comes in, if you want to call
it so.

Unless I, in my turn, am to tell a true story in such a way as
to suggest a lie, some comment is needed here. Morris's own
work was wholly "inspirational" in the higher and better sense
of the term. That is to say, none of it was ever done under
compulsion or without the driving force of a creative impulse
behind it; but, on the other hand, none of it was "inspira-
tional" in the sense of being done by fits and starts with fallow
intervals in between. Driving so many horses abreast as he did,
he had never to wait in idleness for the spirit to move him
toward creation in one medium or another. Should the verse-
impulse be dormant for the moment, the prose-impulse or the
design-impulse, or some other, was in control of his brain and
hand. To put it more accurately, it might be said that one
titanic driving-impulse to create beauty was unintermittently
active, finding release through any one of many media that
offered itself at any given instant, and the medium of the actual
moment was not always — was rarely — consciously chosen.
Thus it seemed to him as though his creations "growed," and

if he ever took pride in them at all, it was rather in the head-
and-hand work which gave them form than in the deeper and
almost unfelt effort which gave them substance. It was not in
him, therefore, to appreciate and allow for the position of a
"nothing-but" — the poet who is poet only, or the painter who
is helpless at aught but painting — who must perforce either
wait in idle sterility for the one impulse to return, or toilingly
turn out work that were better left undone, or done for practice
and then destroyed.

By way of marking the time and pains that Morris gave to
a project, once he had formulated it and put his hand to the
plough, take the following dates :

November 1888. Emery Walker's lecture.

December 1889. Type-designing begun.

December 1890. Last punches of "Golden" type cut.

January 1891. Trial-page pulled of Glittering Plain.
Allowance has to be made, of course, for the fact that he gave
neither the whole of any day nor any fixed part of all his days to
the new undertaking, which was rather the relaxation of leisure
hours than the business to which he must see. Not one of his
usual occupations was put aside, nor did his fertility in other
directions perceptibly slacken. "Relaxation" and "leisure,"
however, are distinctly relative terms when used in connexion
with him ; for he found rest in change of work, and held that he
was idling while doing that which would have exhausted any
other man I have ever known.

To his methods of work I shall have to return, but this much
may be said here: that "the man in the backshop," to use his
own phrase, or "the subconscious mind" in the cant of to-day,
was for ever engaged upon the next job, that visibly in hand
having been thought over and matured while another or others
were exteriorizing themselves in tangible shape. "I have an
artichoke mind," he said once; "no sooner do I pull off a leaf
than there's another waiting to be pulled." Wendell Holmes
has touched somewhere upon the parallel currents of conscious-
ness, and what they carry at a particular time. In Morris's
case, every one of these currents was a creative stream, each of
them busy about its own concerns and untroubled by the others.
Each came to the surface at its own due time, and had but to be
relieved of its rich burden ; this being no sooner drawn, written,

1 1

or otherwise brought into concrete existence, than it was done
with and forgotten.

"I'm a tidyminded man," he urged in his own defence when
Poems by the Way was going through the press, and he could
render little or no help towards getting its contents together.
"Tidymindedness," as he called it, went the length of throw-
ing off all thought of work that had once been finished, and we
had to rely upon others for the retrieving of his fugitive poems
— even for identifying more than one. It is more than prob-
able that this "tidymindedness" had a good deal to do with
the indifference he for so long displayed to the printing of his
works; so soon as the manuscripts had been completed and
handed over, his interest in them waned, if it did not vanish. In
fact, work once done was done with to such an extent that it
must stand or fall on its merits. When the Earthly Paradise
was being re-set for the double-columned single-volume edi-
tion, he saw to the correction of misprints and amended one or
two faulty rhymes, but further than this he would not go.

"A man's hand will tell you more about him, and more truly,
than his tongue or that of anybody else can. Unless you know
his work, you won't learn much by listening to him — and less
yet by reading about him." In order to do my best, however,
toward the understanding of Morris and his achievement,even
on the part of those who are as yet unfamiliar with his work —
with a hope, also, of sending these to search for and study it —
I shall roughly survey the history and condition of book-print-
ing as it was before he took it up, sketch his record and methods
of work as artist and craftsman up to that point, deal with the
course of training through which he put himself, his prepara-
tions to commence printer, tell about the Kelmscott Press and
the books it produced, and then try to estimate its enduring
influence upon the art of printing.

PRINTING IN 1888

It is all the more necessary to outline the history of book-print-
ing as Morris knew it, and to approximate the state in which
he found it, because of the harm, no less than the good, that
has been wrought in the interval. What has been and is being
achieved for the improvement of printing, conscientiously and
with conscious effort — self-conscious only too often — is con-
tinuously imperilled by its very conscientiousness, which tells
nowadays toward science rather than art, as well as by the con-
tinual growth and increased acceptance of mechanism, and the
inevitable toleration of ugliness which comes of that, even to
those who are alert for beauty. Alike as readers, printers and
letter-designers, we suffer from the typewriter, mechanical
compositor and their concomitants — to say nothing of the un-
loveliness of our usual surroundings — which set up in us a sub-
conscious barrier against the beauty we consciously seek.

Morris condemned the typewriter for creative work ; it was
"all right for journalism and the like; there's nothing to be
said for that! For hastily written copy, which doesn't matter
anyway, it may be desirable, or for a chap who can't write
clearly — I daresay the Commonweal compositors would be glad
enough were Blank to go in for one ! — but it's out of place in
imaginative work or work that's meant to be permanent. Any-
thing that gets between a man's hand and his work, you see, is
more or less bad for him. There's a pleasant feel in the paper
under one's hand and the pen between one's fingers that has its
own part in the work done. ... I always write with a quill be-
cause it's fuller in the hand for its weight, and carries ink better

— good ink — than a steel pen I don't like the typewriter or

the pneumatic brush — that thing for blowing ink on to the
paper — because they come between the hand and its work, as
I've said, and again because they make things too easy. The
minute you make the executive part of the work too easy, the
less thought there is in the result. And you can't have art with-
out resistance in the material. No! The very slowness with
which the pen or the brush moves over the paper, or the graver
goes through the wood, has its value. And it seems to me, too,
that with a machine one's mind would be apt to be taken offthe
work at whiles by the machine sticking or what not."

Never having used a typewriter himself, and not knowing
anyone who habitually did so then, he could not foresee a
further evil which comes of it. A man, trained in his youth to
the pen, but for whom the machine is now so familiar that he
seems to think into it without pause or hesitation, has in great
part lost that sense of restraint which made for measure and
rhythm in what he writes, but may in fancy, perhaps, recapture
the sensuous pleasure in the act of writing which once was his.
Imagination may give him the feel of the pen in his fingers, the
glide of his hand upon the paper,and the growth of wordsunder
his eye, while his periods turned themselves upon the recur-
rent but ever-varying curves and lines of the letters he shaped.
But what, even in fancy, he cannot recapture is the unhesitat-
ing certainty with which he could once judge type, telling the
merits or failings of a letter or discriminating between allied
faces, detect a strayed or faulty letter without effort or strained
care, or pull up at a "hound's tooth" which is wellnigh invisible
to him now. He has paid for his gain of speed and accept-
ability to editors with a narcotization of his eye, a diminished
power of swift discrimination, an inurement to the distortion
of letters in order that m and 1 may go upon the same-sized
body and strike into the same space, to a rigidity of spacing
which disfigures a page with "rivers," and all the other con-
cessions to mechanical uniformity. Only by days passed in the
transcription by hand of good models, endeavouring as he goes
along to comprehend the hows and whys of their unadorned
comeliness, can he hope in any measure to regain his old skill.

A printer suffers in a similar way and to an even greater
degree. Continual setting from typewritten copy, even though
he set by hand, has its natural effect, and his estate is worsened

if he set by linotype, having no control over spacing. Add that
the type he sets has too often been compressed for the sake of
money-saving or is mannered for the sake of "difference"; that
punctuation has been over-simplified for the minimizing of
"sorts" ; that the only models he has ever seen, apart from the
current printing of to-day, are, on the average, those that have
been thrust under his uninterested nose at a craft-school or
museum, or been reduced or smoothed into unrecognizability
in his trade-paper ; and one can but pity his lot.

Then,the craze for "time-saving" — in order,it would really
appear, to have time to kill — has had its inevitable effect; its
universal effect, for all crafts and all products have suffered
alike. Brickmaking, for example, has deteriorated no less than
the making of books. Old-time bricks and tiles were made of
heavy clay, long exposed and well tempered, beaten by hand
into the moulds and thus made hard and homogeneous
throughout. Nowadays, the lightest obtainable clay is used
without weathering or tempering, hastily squeezed into shape
by machine, and burned without "waste of time." Though
the "improved" bricks and tiles may be more accurately shaped
and have an external appearance of better finish, there are
hidden inequalities of density, setting up strains and stresses
which make for weakness and lack of durability, wholly un-
known before "science" took a hand in their manufacture and
more than doubled their ultimate cost in seeking immediate
profit. The same story might be told of wood, rubber, silk,
and half a hundred other products, robbed of strength and
durability by commercialized "science."

Nor is the average reader likely — less likely still to be quali-
fied— to call the printer to account. Apart from the typed
letters to which he is accustomed in business, his taste has been
vitiated by the daily reading of books, newspapers and maga-
zines,printed in a variety of disagreeing types,in which the lines
have been spaced at a stroke, so that the spaces between words
are mechanically equal and therefore differ widely to the eye,
while the column or page is bestreaked by rivers, greyed by
skinniness of type and poorness of ink, every defect being em-
phasized by the glare due to wide leading and glazed paper.

Thus, at least as much as in Morris's day, the critical taste
of the average printer is being deadened, where not killed, and

that of the reader falsified where not altogether destroyed, by
an unconsciously cultivated insensitiveness to the little things
that in sum are beauty; their absence entailing its opposite, no
matter how perfected and up-to-date the machinery and the
mechanical skill involved may be. And it must be taken for a
moot point as to whether and how far a designer of type, how-
ever well-intentioned, learned and finely inspired, can alto-
gether escape the fate that has befallen printer and reader,
keeping his eye clear and his taste undefiled in a time that, at
its best, is one of transition and revolt — not always intelligent
— oscillating between dilettantism on the one hand and philis-
tinism on the other.

In printing, we are mercifully preserved from cubism and
the like by the nature of things, though the art nouveau had its
Grasset; but, on the other hand, by the nature of things, the
designer of type is denied a resource which is open to the painter
or sculptor; who, if he will, may return to nature at any time,
finding innumerable models — provided fresh and fresh, as it
were — from which to take example, and by means of which to
restore the truth and strength of his eye. It is true that the
type-designer may also go to nature in order to refresh hisjaded
sense of colour and form, whet the dulled edge of his discern-
ment, and renew his inborn sense of taste. But nature offers
him no model.

There is no absolute standard of perfection in type-design
to which he may refer, no ready-made method or code of rules
by which he may determine the "fashion" of his letter. For
this he is thrown back upon his own eye, with what help he may
get from studying the successes and failures of his predeces-
sors. Their success or their failure he can only judge by the
legibility and beauty of the books they have left him, and by those
qualities in those books alone, and by neither the show of type
on a specimen-sheet nor its misleading look in a reproduction.

From the Renaissance onwards, many attempts have been
made to set up a standard and codify a set of rules through
scientific research and mathematical methods, but Morris very
strongly held that all such attempts were foredoomedto failure ;
though those of the Italian writing-masters, who tried to ascer-
tain and reduce to precept the practice of their exemplars, "had
something to say for themselves."

I any the more: though it would in-
deed be hard if there were nothing
else in the world, no wonders, no ter-
rors, no unspeakable beauties* Yc*
when we think what a small part of
the world's history, past, present, &
to come, is this land we live in, and
howmuch smaller still in the history
of the arts, & yet how our forefathers
clung to it, and with what care and

THE "TROYE TYPE

not see bow these can be betterepent than in
making life cheerful & honourable for others
and for ourselves ; and the gain of good life
to thecoun try atlarge that would result from
men seriously setting about the bettering
of the decency of our big towns would be
priceless, even if nothing specially good be-
fell the arts in consequence: 1 do not know
that it would; but 1 should begin to think
matters hopeful if men turned their atten-
tion to such things, andlrepeat that, unless
they do so, we can scarcely even begin with
any hopeour endeavours for the betteringof
tbeHrts. (from the lecture called TTbe Lesser
Hrts, in Ropes and fears for Hrt, by Glilliam
Morris, pages 22 and 33*)

THE "CHAUCER TYPE

While Morris was at work upon printing, Talbot Baines
Reed formulated a tentative statement, based upon the re-
searches and experiments of Dr. Javal and other continental
scientists, which met with his approval, as well as that of another
friend of his, the well-known oculist, William Lang: i. That
the eye, after all, is the sovereign judge of form. 2. That, in
reading, the eye travels horizontally along a perfectly straight
line, lying slightly below the top of the ordinary letters. So
that the width of a letter is of more consequence than its height,
and the upper half of it than the lower. 3. That, in reading,
the eye does not take in letters, but words or groups of words.
4. That the type which by its regularity of alignment, its
due balance between black and white, its absence of dazzling
contrasts between thick and thin, by its simplicity and un-
obtrusiveness, lends itself most readily to this rapid and com-
prehensive action of the eye, is the most legible. 5. That such
type is, on the whole, the most beautiful.

In accepting this as a summary outline of the matter, with
strong reservations as to Nos. 4 and 5, Morris laid particular
stress upon the first article — that the eye, after all, is the sove-
reign judge of form — and as a corollary insisted upon the
need of pursuing the inquiry into periods before the invention
of printing.

Inasmuch as the hand of the penman is free to follow the
dictates of his eye, and is freest when unhampered by theory
or dominated by the demand of a machine-ridden market,
it stands to reason that there was more likelihood of making
letters legible and beautiful when books were hand-written
than at any later time. When hand and eye are in consonance,
the hand responds — automatically, it might almost be said —
to a desire for pleasure on the part of the eye. The odds are
therefore in favour of the pre-mechanistic manuscript as op-
posed to the printed book, even at its best, when choosing an
object of study with a view to disengaging the factors of legi-
bility and beauty.

It need hardly be said that "legibility" and "beauty," for
Morris, meant something other than easy readability for the
mass of readers, whose literary appetite is met by the report of
a murder or a written-to-sell short-story, or the gingerbread
sham-beauty which entices those whose artistic demands are

17 c

satisfied by the movies or a "kiss-me" lithograph. Nor did the
meaning he gave the words coincide with that which is given
them by the slightly more cultivated who yet are victims of the
toleration of ugliness, now so common in our machine-made
world.

These qualities, as he thought of them, he found in the
work of the earlier printers, and yet more completely in that of
the scribes, their predecessors and exemplars ; seeing them, as
he did, with eyes that had been disciplined by long years of
scrutinizing and rendering all kinds of natural form in many
kinds of material. If he had been accused of surrendering to
convention in so thinking and acting, he would very cheerfully
have pleaded guilty to the charge, and would then have carried
the war into the enemy's country by demonstrating that human
work in any field is and must be entirely governed from first to
last by "convention" — that is, by convenience in the higher and
wider sense of the word. That in the particular field with which
we are here concerned, the making and reading of books, the
written or printed word is no more than a conventional symbol,
which by general agreement or convention is intended to sug-
gest rather than convey a sound ; which sound in its turn is no
more than a conventional symbol, intended to evoke an idea
that it cannot represent. That, in short, as printers, not to say
as human beings, we are very strictly confined to a world of
convention. That the opposite of convention is anarchy and
a welter of whimsies, and that the real question lies between
a convention that has been found convenient during a long
period of working convenience, and one that has been or may
be set up to accord with or excuse the evanescent needs or de-
sires of a passing epoch. And he would have quoted, as I have
heard him quote, Cesar Daily's retort upon Viollet-le-Duc:
"M. Viollet-le-Duc is a very great man; but, for my part, I
prefer to appeal to history."

When books were multiplied by hand, each successive copy
of a fine manuscript was, or tended to be, an experiment in the
direction of greater legibility and beauty — inevitably so, for
the reasons that have already been given. The conventions ar-
rived at were transmitted by precept and example, i.e. by tradi-
tion and custom \ tradition, which reached back into the night
of time, was continuously being enriched, while custom was

continuously being modified, as the outcome of practical work-
ing experience, down to the Renaissance. This applies to all
the arts and crafts without exception. There were of course
many manuscripts, of lesson-books or other books of utility,
that were turned out as rapidly as possible, without thought of
beauty or touch of decoration ; but even for these, tradition
held, and at their very worst they are immeasurably above the
eye-degrading school-books and utility-books of our own time.
For the better class of work there was always a demand, there-
fore a supply, and there are hundreds of manuscripts in exist-
ence that go near to perfection ; few libraries of note are now
without examples to which reference may profitably be made
by a student. The unornamented and less-valued manuscripts
have perished and are perishing day by day. Morris once gave
me some leaves out of one of these latter, rescued from a
maker of children's tambourines — together with some forcible
advice as to my handwriting — which leave nothing to be de-
sired in the direction of unadorned grace.

Printing — "that most noble of the Mechanick Arts, being
that which to Letters and Science hath given the Precision
and Durability of the printed Page" — was invented in re-
sponse to a growing demand for speed; as was the steam-
engine two hundred years later. It came at an opportune mo-
ment for the world in general, but at a fatal one for its own
continued integrity as an art. Indeed, as an art, printing de-
clined in an inverse ratio to its rise as an industry; largely be-
cause of the loss of tradition and the debasement of the general
level of taste in "that period of blight which was introduced by
the so-called Renaissance," when men entered upon "a singu-
larly stupid and brutal phase of that rhetorical and academic
art which, in all matters of ornament, has held Europe captive
ever since. ... A time of so much and such varied hope that
people call it the time of the New Birth; as far as the arts are
concerned, I deny it that title; rather it seems to me that the
great men who lived and glorified the practice of art in those
days were the fruit of the old, not the seed of the new order of
things."

The press being already in existence, the invention was a
double one : that of movable metal types, and that of printer's
ink; this latter an adaptation of oil-paint, itself but recently

invented. And behind the invention lay the idea of repro-
ducing manuscripts, with greater facility and speed than
could be made possible with the pen, but with the utmost
achievable fidelity of adaptation. It may be only a legend
that the first printed books were offered and bought for manu-
scripts, and, in any case, the deception could not long have
been maintained; but the first intention undoubtedly was
to adapt the work of the pen. It may be noted, in passing,
that as a consequence the first great printed book remained
the best printed book until the Kelmscott Chaucer came to
rival it.

Naturally, the first printers took the best manuscripts with-
in reach as their models, not only in general but in particular,
not only as wholes but in detail. That is to say, not only were
their founts designed to resemble the handwriting of chosen
manuscripts, but each letter in a fount was closely copied from
the most attractive out of many variants. If there were, as
there were, a dozen or a score or more m's or d's or y's on a
page, each varying slightly from all the others, as they must,
the type-designer took that which satisfied his penman's eye
the more fully for model; feeling free, at the same time, to
adapt it as might be needed to his new methods. And in taking
over the manner and semblance of a manuscript, he took over
the tradition that went along with it.

For the Roman letter, all out the more important in our
western world, Nicholas Jenson the Frenchman, working at
Venice, though not absolutely the first was the greatest of the
pioneers. He selected the best letters from the best work of
his contemporaries among the Italian scribes — who had them-
selves not so long before returned upon the noble simplicity of
an earlier day — and brought them triumphantly into line with
the requirements of typography. His characters are those of a
highly trained penman and man of taste, well rounded within a
square, at once dignified and clear. There is the individuality
of an artist in them, without in any way detracting from their
fidelity to tradition or their unaffected severity. Their align-
ment is even, but not baldly neat ; descenders and ascenders are
gracefully in proportion to the ordinary letters ; and the counter
or inside white is as open as it may well be without conveying
a suggestion of weakness. All serifs are right-angled, which

gives them durability, and adds a spirited finishing touch to
the letter.

Aldus followed Jenson, and improved upon his roman in
some ways, though the Aldine Greek type is poor, being taken
from the debased Greek handwritingof his time ; but the manu-
script influence was on the wane, and the medieval tradition,
"unbroken since the very first beginnings of art upon this
planet," was perceptibly dying. Good as the Aldine roman
might be, its designer's hand had not been subdued to the pen,
and it betrays the first frosty touch of academicism upon his
mind. Looking back, we see that this was only what might
have been expected; for, while the "study of Greek literature
at first hand " aided the intellectual development of cultivated
men, yet "since they did but half understand its spirit, [it] was
warping their minds into fresh error." They "thought they
saw a perfection of art which to their minds was different in
kind . . . from the ruder suggestive art of their fathers ; this
perfection they were anxious to imitate, this alone seemed to be
art to them ; the rest was childishness." But "when the great
masters of the Renaissance were gone, they who, stung by the
desire of doing something new, turned their mighty hands to
the work of destroying the last remains of living popular art,
putting in its place for a while the results of their own wonder-
ful individuality — when these great men were dead, and lesser
men . . . were masquerading in their garments, then at last it
was seen what the so-called New Birth really was; then we
could see that it was the fever of the strong man yearning to
accomplish something before his death, not the simple hope of
the child, who has long years of life and growth before him."

Hastened by the segregation of the "fine" from the "do-
mestic" arts, those that are also crafts, their divorce from archi-
tecture, and the growing division between men of thought and
men of action, between head-men and hand-men — which has
now been carried so far that plans and designs are made by men
who could not possibly carry them out, and carried out by men
who cannot in the least understand or appreciate them — the
arts "in these latter days of the Renaissance . . . took the down-
ward road with terrible swiftness, and tumbled down at the
bottom of the hill, where, as if bewitched, they lay long in great
content."

GeorTroy Tory, professor of philosophy turned printer's
reader — which meant no loss of prestige or status in those days
as it does in these, when the "knowing noodles," as Morris
termed them, keep apart from useful men — and theorist above
all things, tried to reduce lettering to an exact science, and the
designing of type to a mathematical system. He was one of
those who thought they saw a perfection of art that was differ-
ent in kind from the ruder art of their fathers, and was stung
by the desire of doing something new. Far-fetched and ill-
founded as were his conclusions, they inspired a greater man
than he, his pupil, Claude Garamond, when producing that
which was to rank above all others as the model type of modern
Europe.

To deny Garamond's merit would be ridiculous, or to be-
little the graceful, if academic, proportioning of his letter; of
this, the thins are in definite and pleasing relation to the thicks,
while its triangled serifs are as well calculated as Jenson's to
finish off a character with spirit, and to retain their sharp
strength under usage. A great advance in punchcutting is
marked by the keen arrises of its face, and the justification of
the fount as a whole goes far to show that letterfounding, no
less than punchcutting, was coming near to technical perfec-
tion. When so much has been said, however, one is compelled
to set against Garamond's name that, in connexion with print-
ing, he was the last and most fatal of the "strong men yearn-
ing," rather the "fruit of the old" than the "seed of the new";
that his was the proudest and the final repudiation of that
immemorial heritage of tradition that the earlier printers had
taken over from "the fathers and famous men that begat them. ' '

It is characteristic of the Renaissance that Garamond, like
his master, was attracted as by an irresistible tropism to the
academic leaden age of Rome rather than to the virile period
of growth which had preceded it. Lettering was the one indi-
genous art of Rome, the single one undominated by Greek
precedent, and was akin therefore to the crafts which were
more particularly Roman in maintaining its fertility and free-
dom for some time after all else had been reduced to rule and
regulated from above. The first year of our epoch may roughly
be taken as marking its point of culmination ; thenceforward
— though, as has been said, it held out longer than most, especi-

ally in outlying parts of the Empire — it shared with all the
other arts in the steadily deadening effect of the replacement
of the free craftsman by slave labour. The earliest examples
we have are inscriptions on stone, stiffly archaic; but pen-
writing seems to have come in about 300 B.C., most probably
from the East, and exerted a marked influence, even upon
monumental inscriptions.

"In pen-written characters," as W. R. Lethaby says in
Londinium, "the thick and thin strokes make themselves with-
out there being any design in the matter. It seems equally
natural in large clear writing to finish off the strokes with a
thin touch of the pen to sharpen the forms. This procedure
was taken over so exactly into inscriptions cut on stone that,
for the most part, it seems these must first have been written
on the stone with an implement like a wide brush and cut in
afterwards by a mason. The chisel, like the pen, is thin and
wide, and thus perfectly fitted to develop the habit of the pen.
. . . Whoever wishes to design inscriptions must begin on the
writing basis . . . take up the practice of writing capital and
small letters with single strokes of the pen, not 'touching up'
or 'painting' the letters, and, above all, not 'designing' them
with high-waisted bars, swollen loops, little-headed S curves,
and other horrors of ignorance and vulgarity, but learning once

for all a central standard style It is difficult to draw out any

general rules of form and spacing; generally O and C were
very round in form, N of square proportions, and M wider than
a square. The round letters were usually thickened, not where
the curves would touch vertical tangents, but a little under and
over, just as is natural in writing the letters. The loops of D
and R do not become horizontal at top and bottom, but bend
freely. A, N and M usually have square terminations at the
upper angles." Examples of rapid cursive writing on bricks
and tiles, written while the clay was yet soft and unburnt, give
the origin of our lower-case letters.

Later on, as free labour was gradually killed out by slave-
labour, for which "designs" must be provided that could be
blindly followed and mechanically executed, all those virile
qualities which derived from the free pen or chisel in the hand
of a free craftsman gave way before an encroaching tide of
academic formalism. The "strong men" of the Renaissance,

who were the unwitting pioneers of a slave-epoch in all but the
individualistic arts, inevitably turned to the slave-time prece-
dents, and bent their energies to the academizing of these to
a higher degree — or a lower. And again, quite naturally, the
designer of to-day, a day of dehumanized machine industry,
served by men who are nominally freemen in all but their work,
too frequently follows the Renaissance masters in their follow-
ing rule-ridden precedents instead of going behind them to the
age of gold. It is not merely that his mind, steeped in the
slave-atmosphere, is attuned to the leaden age, but that he
finds it easier to shape himself upon the academic imitators of
leaden Rome than upon the originals these last imitated, and
fell short of. If a man has an innate preference for the Classic,
surely there is no reason why he should not seek inspiration in
the firm yet free lettering of the best period, and do fine work
as a result! But, even then, he would be well advised to give at
least an equal attention to the later Middle Age, when the
book had been fully evolved, and lettering subdued to the needs
of the book instead of those merely of the monument.

It has been said of Garamond that he emancipated the art
of printing from the shackles of a dead past, though it is by no
means easy to find the mark of those shackles, or any others,
upon the extraordinarily varied and living work of those who
went before him. Nor can it be claimed that any of his own
successors improved upon or equalled him, as they must in-
evitably have done had he actually freed their feet from any
impediment, or pointed the way to higher things. With Gara-
mond, as a matter of historic fact, easily verified by any one who
has eyes to see, ended the last faint lingering influence upon
printing of that orally transmitted craft-knowledge, that rich
heritage of tradition which had been accumulating "since the
veryfirst beginningsof art upon this planet." Andif shackles
come into the matter at all, he rather aided the imposition of
new than struck away any old ones.

Garamond, indeed, stands upon the verge of that Valley of
the Shadow of Death into which all the arts were to descend,
and his own type was very soon tinkered with to bring it into
accord with a lowering taste, on the way down to the corrup-
tion of that "epoch of piggery and periwiggery," the "vile
Pompadour period." "The fine arts, which had in the end of

FROM THE ENGRAVED TITLE PAGE FOR SYR YSAMBRACE I 897
Border by William Morris. Picture by Sir E. Burne-Jones. Engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper

the 1 6th century descended from the expression of the people's
faith and aspirations into that of the fancy, ingenuity and
whim of gifted individuals, fell lower still, dragging the do-
mestic or applied arts in their train. They lost every atom of
beauty and dignity, and retained little even of the ingenuity of
the earlier Renaissance," while tradition had still a fading life
in it, becoming "mere expensive and pretentious though care-
fully finished upholstery, mere adjuncts of pomp and state,
the expression of the insolence of riches and the complacency
of respectability."

In the earlier printed books, as in the manuscripts upon
which they followed, a reciprocal harmony between the thicks
and thins of the lettering and those of the black-and-white
illustrations or decorations — which may, as in Roman days,
have been undesignedly arrived at through the use of the pen
when drawing for both — had been maintained as a tradition,
if not for its own sake. Under the new dispensation, this har-
mony disappeared, and the utmost fertility of invention and
mechanical skill was devoted to bringing disparate processes
to bear upon book-production, till an expensive book became
rather a forced assemblage of quarrelsome elements than an
organic whole, was "bedizened rather than ornamented," while
the type itself lost its own inner agreement, and in the end, by
Bodoni and Didot, its thins were thinned until they were skin-
nily mean, and its thicks thickened until they were potbellied.

If this were the fate of printing as an art, as the "expression
of the insolence of riches," its degradation as a trade went
naturally and inevitably further; for "the complacency of re-
spectability" was but a poor safeguard against the growth of
commercialism. A stand was made for a time, here and there,
as by the Elzevirs, who followed Garamond as their exemplar
but lowered the standard he had set, and notably by William
Caslon, who commenced founder in 1720 — the year, by the
way,in which Samuel Richardson commenced printer — taking
his letter from among the best of the Elzevirs, but giving it a
little more solidity than they did, a hint of the manner of about
a hundred years before.

Caslon's type has more than a tinge of "the complacency of
respectability," but is thoroughly British in being a common-
sense compromise between the academic weakness and the

clumsy vulgarity which characterized the reigning types of his
time. It is regular, bold and clear ; its thins are of a commend-
able thickness, while its thicks have none of the coarseness pre-
valent among its Dutch competitors. It is well and truly justi-
fied, each letter being designed and cut as one of an alphabet,
every member of which must range and harmonize with all the
others. Even when there is a perceptible weakness in one letter
— e.g. the lower-case s, always the most difficult letter in a
Roman fount — when examined in isolation, that weakness can
hardly be detected when the letter appears in combination with
others on a page. This attribute of good ranging is woefully to
seek in many of the founts due to his immediate predecessors,
contemporaries and successors, and is only too often lacking
in those of these days, even in some of the most able and con-
scientious efforts of good men.

Caslon did not only look after the relation of letter to letter
in a fount, but was careful to preserve an harmonious relation
throughout the whole series of which that fount was a part, so
that a printer might be able to use two or more sizes of his type
upon a job, and be sure of the same fashion and quality from
one end of it to the other. This is not quite so easily managed
as might be thought, and its achievement marks out Caslon as
something of an artist. A working series of Roman founts that
will cheerfully go together is not to be got by designing a letter,
of whatever merit, and reducing or enlarging it with mathe-
matical exactitude or by mechanical means. When reducing
from a larger size to a smaller, for example, though the width
of the letter should be in strict proportion, the length of the
descenders and height of the ascenders must be relatively in-
creased, while the thickness of the thicks, compared with that
of the thins and the serifs, must also be greater. But there is
no rule in the matter beyond the rule of thumb : "the eye, after
all, is the sovereign judge of form."

As Garamond stands upon the brink of the pit into which
printing descended, in company with all the arts, so do Bodoni
and Didot stand at its bottom, with Baskerville near to them.
Over-thinning the thins and over-thickening the thicks of
their letter, at the cost of making their types too delicate for
wear, leading heavily, and printing in glossy ink upon paper of
a polished smoothness, they obtained a seductively delusive

appearance of luxury that even yet appeals to the depraved in
taste, but which is tiring to the eye and repulsive to the lover of
a quietly dignified page.

Until the eighteen-twenties there was little or no improve-
ment. William Pickering (i 821-18 31) began to publish the
famous "Diamond Classics," reprints inspired by the produc-
tions of Aldus, whose mark he adopted, adding the legend:
Aldi Discip. Anglus. These were at first printed by Corrall, of
whom nothing more than this would appear to be known, and
later by Charles Whittingham I. The first Whittingham's
work marked a very distinct advance upon anything then being
done, or that had been done for many years, but was by no
means equal to that of his more celebrated nephew. In 1829
began the long intimacy between Pickering and CharlesWhit-
tingham II. to which the latter was indebted for so much of
his taste and ambition as a book-printer. Under Pickering's
influence, Charles Whittingham II. raised the Chiswick Press
to a pitch of efficiency and a command of material which placed
it in the forefront of British book-printing: a position which,
under Whittingham's able and enterprising successors, it held
for many years.

Whether due to the example of the Chiswick Press or no,
there was a general advance in British book-printing, slight
but unmistakable, during the succeeding years, one sign of
which was an increasing use of Caslon's letter ("old-face") and
its adaptations ("old-style"). Apart from this, however, pro-
gress went in the direction of a smug hardness and uninterest-
ing mediocrity, as in the case of Didot's disciples, French or
Scotch, to the last-named being due the "new-face," which has
unhappily come to be the accepted letter for scientific works
and works of utility. Alongside of these developments went
the introduction and spread of "ornamental" or "fancy" types.

Until the latter half of the 18th century, "ornamental" or
"fancy" types were practically unknown. In earlier days, of
course, the over-florid yet handsome Teuerdankletter had been
designed and used for the honour and glory of Maximilian
I., but this can hardly be counted in, and — if only because
of its excessive employment of kerned letters — found few
imitators. Excepting for "bloomers" or decorated initials,
fleurons and vignettes,the three standard letters — roman, italic

and black — were virtually untampered with before about what
may be called the Bodoni epoch. But about the time when
Bodoni was wreaking his wicked will upon body-type, sporadic
attempts began to be made at "variety" upon French and far
more frequently upon German titlepages, and in Germany now
and then throughout whole volumes. At first, the innovation
rarely went further than the addition of a shaded line outside
the solid face of a roman or italic letter, or a further touch of
eccentricity or spikiness to the jraktur. But it was not long
before the solid line of a roman began to be shaded, beaded,
rusticated, or bedevilled in some other way — e.g. to give the
letter an appearance of being in intaglio or in relief — or the
letter itself to be distorted into a tomfool imitation of copper-
plate or even of needlework.

When once the time-honoured form of the letter had begun
to be meddled with, the dykes were down in earnest, and the
movement speedily transgressed the bounds of sanity. New-
fangled founts, in which the letter leant this way or that, was
wiry to the limit or flowery to the extreme, lengthily drawn out
or absurdly squat, curlicued or brokenbacked — one of them
appropriately advertised as "chaos-type" — were poured into
the market until 1888 and beyond; many of them by French
or British founders, but most of them by the more versatile
and unrestrainedly inventive distortionists of Germany and
America.

Not all of these innovations, it must be allowed, were
merely perverse. A few showed signs of a real, if misguided,
striving after better things, gleams of what, under other condi-
tions, might have been good taste. But the bulk of them were
irredeemable monstrosities,wearisome "novelties" of the baser
sort, catchpenny attempts at being "different," intended be-
fore all else to tickle the jaded palate of an undiscriminating
public. They were mainly made use of in "job" printing, for
handbills or the like, or in advertisements, as a few of them
still are, but many of them found their way into book-printing
by way of titlepages, dropped heads, and so on. Those printers
who, like C. T. Jacobi in Great Britain or Theodore de Vinne
in America, resisted or did not feel the temptation to crowd
their titlepages, and sometimes their pages, with a mixture of
heteroclite sizes and faces, often adding to the effect with

rococo or fretsaw "ornaments," might be numbered on the
fingers of one hand.

Kegan Paul, writing of "The Production and Life of
Books" in 1883, said that "there could scarcely be a better
thing for the artistic future of books than that which might
be done by some master of decorative art, like Mr. William
Morris, and some great firm of typefounders in conjunction,
would they design and produce some new types for our choicer
printed books." This wish was now on the road to something
more than fulfilment; for Morris did not merely design some
new types but re-discovered, studied and practised the making
of books in all its branches and from the root up.

Ill

MORRIS IN 1888

Morris came to printing as an all-round craftsman, already a
conqueror in many fields. Important as is the place he fills in
the history of printing, printing was but one of his activities, as
has been seen, and the latest of them at that. This not only
tells for his own greatness, but goes far towards explaining his
achievement as type-designer, decorator, practical printer, and
all-round maker of beautiful books, standing second to none of
his predecessors and far above all who have yet followed him.

For years past, when confronted with a new trade and com-
pelled to acquire a new technique, his invariable experience
had been that he must go back to the days before machinery in
order to find the best models, and also the best methods by
which he might hope to equal these. It was this experience
that nowsenthim to manuscripts and incunabula for his models,
and the earlier printers for his methods. At the same time, as
will duly appear, he neglected to learn nothing that his own
day could offer him.

For his own writings in printed form, he had for a long
time been more or less content with a passable adequacy. In
this he was helped by his "tidymindedness," to which refer-
ence has been made; once they had left his hand, his poems or
stories interested him no longer ; they had, as it were, ceased to
be his, and what became of them was not his business. But, as
always, once aroused to a real need, he resolutely set himself to
the task of meeting it; meeting it as a practical craftsman, and
not as an a priori theorist.

He was, by nature, neither an innovator nor a reactionary;
that which was old was not necessarily good in his eyes, nor

that which was new to be acclaimed or condemned on the score
of its newness. It invariably was the work which counted, and
counted for its inherent worth; not its age or the name of the
man who had wrought it. Book, picture, tapestry, or piece of
furniture, the work stood or fell upon its own merits, without
the least regard to the period or the person that had produced
it. He protested, for example, against "restoration" of ancient
buildings because "the art of that time was the outcome of the
life of that time," and therefore could not be re-supplied or
amended ; because "the imitative art of to-day is not and cannot
be the same thing as ancient art, and cannot replace it"; be-
cause ancient buildings "are documents of a wholly past con-
dition of things, documents which to alter or correct is, in fact,
to falsify and render worthless." But never, never once, be-
cause they were old. In the same way, and to the same degree,
modern work was denounced where and when it was bad,
praised where and when it was good; but neither the one nor
the other because it was new. Thus also with methods of work ;
that which aided him or guided him in doing the work before
him was good, be it new or old; that which hampered him or
debased the work was bad : he had no other criterion. He has
been accused by one school of doctrinaires of being a reckless
Utopian, by another of being a hidebound believer in a dead
epoch, the truth being that he offended both by demanding
that their doctrines be brought to the test of working practice,
and by upholding long-continued everyday experience as the
ultimate authority.

In turning to a new kind of work, its attraction for him also
lay in the need for or worth of the work in itself, and not at all
in any desire for a change. He is frequently spoken of as "ver-
satile," but in so far as the word is taken to imply a restless or
causeless veering from one occupation to another, or to convey
the faintest hint of instability or caprice, it is the least fitting of
all possible terms; only in its derivative sense of manysided-
ness, and the ability to take up a new craft or trade at call, is it
applicable. For an additional art or craft was always accepted
rather than sought by him; some workaday difficulty that he
alone could overcome, or a fresh demand that he alone could
meet, consistently lay behind each extension of his activities.
Thus the call for furniture, hangings and curtains, in the days

of Red Lion Square, when tolerable chairs and tables, honest
materials and satisfactory colourings were not to be bought,
drove him into joinery, upholstery, weaving, dyeing, printing
upon cotton and linen. Thus also, the lack of a "decent-seem-
ing" book of his own drove him into mastering the many in-
tricacies of printing, and of the tributary crafts that have to do
with it.

No craft or art was ever dropped by him so long as there
was any need that he should practise it, nor did it ever become
uninteresting through the study or practice of another. Once
mastered, it remained with him as a permanent possession, a
matter of deep and continued concern, to which any number of
others might be added, but which could be supplanted by none.
But here, once more, it was the work that mattered, and not his
own skill or his own joy in it. Ready as he was to take up an
art or a craft at need, he was equally ready to surrender it, in
whole or in part, to any friend or fellow-worker who could and
would carry it through as thoroughly and well as himself. Thus
he gave over painting to Edward Burne-Jones, architecture
to Philip Webb, and much of the work at Merton Abbey to
pupils or assistants. At Merton Abbey, of course, he retained
the full control of all materials, methods and processes, keeping
a vigilant eye upon the product, and lending a hand anywhere
and anywhen did he see need.

This absence of jealousy, and readiness to share the work
and the joy and triumph of the work with others, was due to
an utter lack of self-consciousness, which also goes far to ex-
plain the universality of his genius and the tremendous amount
of his varied output. By nature, indeed, he was as utterly single-
minded as in material achievement he was manysided. To use
a cant-word of to-day, his attitude was as completely "object-
ive" as that of Shakespeare; or, using a term of his own, he
was never for an instant a "go-to-ist." That is to say, he was
constitutionally incapable of bothering about his own reactions
or emotions, of thinking or saying: "Go to, /will do thus and
so ; this or that work is mineV He thought always of the work,
this work, or that work, but never of my work ; and condemned
"go-to-ism" in others, not only for its immediate effects, van-
ity, self-seeking, and so on, but because it led so directly to
"see-what-I-can-do-ism," which was bad for one's work.

WHEN ADAM DELVED
AND EVE SPAN
WHO WAS THEN TH
GENTLEMA

■^

£-aJ

FRONTISPIECE TO " A DREAM OF JOHN BALL BY WILLIAM MORRIS
Drawn by E. Burne-Jones. Engraved by W. H. Hooper. Border by Morris

See-what-I-can-do-ism, in any field of activity, irked him to
the point of blasphemy. "Michel Angelo I don't like," said
he. "No, I'm hanged if I do, big as he is! It isn't that I blame
him for knowing how learned and all-fired clever he was. A
chap can hardly help knowing that he knows his work. But he
let that good conceit of himself get between him and his work.
He couldn't keep his eyes in the boat for thinking about it.
Now, you take his Moses, and you can see that Moses himself
or what Moses stood for didn't interest him a little bit; or, at
any rate, not enough, compared to turning Moses into a peg to
hang his own cleverness on. He made of poor old Moses an op-
portunity for showing off his knowledge of anatomy and skill
of hand. What he really liked was to pile up difficulties for the
sake of coping with them, foreshortenings, and bunched-up
muscles, and that sort of thing, and he took jolly good care that
they were such as everyone could see. It was just as clever of
Blondin to walk his rope at six feet from the ground as across
Niagara, but the gapemouthed public wouldn't have under-
stood that, or paid as much to see it. There wasn't the same
chance of seeing him break his neck."

To divert his attention from the work in hand by making
him self-conscious, or by betraying self-consciousness, made
him acutely uncomfortable, and the discomfort was likely to be
passed on. A friend, classed by him in conversation among
"teachers," was foolish enough to interrupt by deprecating
the term, and was instantly told: "Well, for a learner you're
damnably talkative ! ' '

Adapting a text, so that it read: "Seek ye first the glory of
the work and all these things shall be added unto you," he op-
posed "seek-ye-firsts" to "go-to-ists" and "see-what-I-can-do-
ists" as being the true artists. And there was more in this than
apt phrasing or a telling antithesis; it expressed the very heart
of his creed: work in fellowship, and that alone, realizes the
divine in man. To put oneself in the first place is to distort the
scheme of things, and open the door to a base form of idolatry,
while to barter away the purity of one's art for place, fame or
money is to commit the sin against the Holy Ghost. "A
painter," said he, "should be as transparently impersonal as a
window." That this was a counsel of perfection, of course, he
knew well enough; but he held, and held strongly, that the

33 d

mere effort at impersonality goes far towards aiding the under-
lying personality to come through. "If a man isn't thinking
about himself, he is himself; if he thinks about himself, he's
likely to drift into thinking about what somebody else will think
of him, and that's fatal. . . . Stick two fellows in front of an
apple-tree, neither of whom thinks about himself, and they'll
both get the apple-tree, but in their own despite there'll be a
difference, and the difference will be that of personality."

Nor had he any sense of higher and lower, either with re-
gard to the particular kind of work to be done or to the men who
took part in it. The work, of course, must come under the rule
into which he had compressed the law and the prophets : ' ' Have
nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful and
believe to be beautiful." Note in passing, as a corrective to
many silly ideas about Morris, the relative stress upon utility
and beauty!

Once the work had answered this requirement, it was worth
doing with all one's might, and any man who took part in it,
let that part be never so subordinate, if he gave of his best, was
accepted and treated as a brother-craftsman and therefore an
equal. "To his own workmen," says A. Clutton-Brock, "he
was masterful enough at times, but as their foreman and not as
their social superior. He lost his temper with them sometimes,
but always as man with man, and they recognized one of them-
selves when he did so." Thus it had been from the outset of
his career, and thus it was at the Kelmscott Press, where every-
one from devil to overseer felt pride in being a co-worker, with
but not under him, taking his fierily worded criticism or warm
praise as they came and were meant, because of care for the
work.

This attitude of mind, wholly natural and untainted with
condescension, while it enabled him, without thought on his
part, to bring out of men more than they had ever imagined
to be in them — in many cases more than they were ever to
bring out of themselves again — was resented by "see-what-I-
can-do-ists" and those whose uneasy egotism it inevitably left
unsated. He has even been accused of callousness and an in-
capacity for personal friendship by men who — unconsciously,
it may be — demanded an appreciation of their personal merit
or personal charm that he could not or did not express. The

truth being that his preoccupation with what was in hand, his
own work or that of the man in front of him, would necessarily
blind him to an itching self-love that he had never felt in him-
self, and could not therefore allow for in anyone else.

To his lifelong and well-tried capacity for warm personal
friendship there is no lack of irrefutable testimony, and the
artist or craftsman who came into touch with him, not over-
mastered by vanity or self-seeking, did not always hesitate on
the hither side of idolatry. Indeed, it might almost be said that
a man's response to Morris measured the degree to which his
work or himself came first in his concern. Approach Morris
for information or advice, and he was wholly yours for as long
as your honest need lasted; but go to him in the hope of un-
deserved praise or some repeatable flattery,and you came empty
away, sometimes turning into an enemy on the strength of it.
For he did not suffer fools gladly, even when it would have been
his interest to do so. A wealthy customer got hold of him once
at Morris & Co.'s, worrying and wearying him with a demand
for "subdued" colours, until at length he threw open the street
door, and shouted : "If it's mud you want, there's lots of it out
there!"

It is only fair to say, fair to some who fell away from him,
that his own titanic powers, and the conviction formed from
his own experience that no craft or art was difficult in the ab-
sence of a physical disability — its material might be refractory
or the mastery of its technique a matter of patience, but that
was all — put an undue strain upon any weaker man who tried
to keep up with him ; a strain he had never felt, and could there-
fore neither realize nor fully sympathize with.

As he gave, so did he take, teaching and learning with a like
spirit and a like restrained impetuosity ; not that there was any
man who could give Morris anything like what Morris had to
give him ; but have anything to tell him that he wanted to know
— and in connexion with work of any kind there was little he
did not — he would get out of you all you knew; not seldom far
more than you had known you knew. It is pertinent here to
recall that a favourite game of his, played with his family and
visitors at Kelmscott Manor, was "Twenty Questions," and
that Lord Chief Justice Coleridge declared he could have been
the greatest cross-examiner of all time. As apprentice printer,

somewhat has been said, and more will have to be, with regard
to his relations with Emery Walker. Those with C. T. Jacobi
of the Chiswick Press will presently call for mention. The
secrets of punchcutting he absorbed from Edward P. Prince,
and his acquaintance with wood-engraving was added to in
talks with W. H. Hooper, though wood-engraving he prac-
tised no more and punchcutting he never attempted. With
Joseph Batchelor for mentor,he studied the technique of paper-
making, making two sheets with his own hand; but, finding
that he could rely upon getting what he wanted, did not once
revisit the mill. He talked and listened to compositors, his
intent eye taking in every movement of their hands, and every
detail of their tools, until he knew as much as they did of
spacing, justification, and all the rest of it. With pressmen he
spent hours, familiarizing himself with every particularity of
their doings, from the reason for damping paper in a given
way, and to a given degree, to that for a lingering "dwell" when
the type had been brought into touch with it. But, again, he
never stood at case or pulled a sheet; his trusted fellow-crafts-
men were there for that.

There was, however, no theory or hard-and-fast rule in these
matters, and he frequently indulged in what he called "the
laziness of fiddling over detail." His friend and fellow-
member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings,
Thackeray Turner, one day found him spotting the back-
ground of a design with dots, and heard him asked why, in
the name of goodness, he did not hand that work over to an
assistant? "Do you think," demanded Morris, "that I am
such a fool, after having had the grind of doing the design, as
to let another man have the fun of putting in the dots?"

It has already been said that "relaxation" in the case of
Morris was a relative term, and "laziness" as he applied it to
himself was that also. When he was "fiddling over detail" or
indulging in "laziness," though it did mean in a measure that
he was really "having fun," it meant yet more that "the man in
the backshop" was busy, and that the next "leaf" of the "arti-
choke" was being matured. When it is told of him that he
wrote seven hundred verses at a sitting, the story is usually nar-
rated as though this were an instance of the poet's eye in a fine
frenzy rolling, of inspiration at white heat. As a matter of fact,

Morris had composed and perfected the poem, as was his usual
way, before ever he set pen to paper, and then wrote it out at a
rush to get rid of it. I have often heard a compositor speak of
a "take" of Morris's copy as "a fair treat" ; there was hardly a
blot, an alteration or an erasure from start to finish, or one un-
clear letter. It might or might not have been written by instal-
ments, while a dozen other jobs were being carried through,
but it read and looked as though the pen had moved swiftly
and uninterruptedly, without stumble or hesitation, from be-
ginning to end. It may be suggested, parenthetically, that
from this method of working comes the spoken quality of his
verse, its address entirely to the ear, so that it must be read
aloud if its full beauty is to be brought out, which worries the
run of critics, accustomed as they are to verse that has been
composed and worked over piecemeal in written form, and
addressed to the eye like a piece of word-mosaic, as most of
it is.

Morris's many-layered mental fertility has been several
times referred to, but the indefatigable industry of his "man
in the backshop" — who should, more accurately, be spoken of
in the plural — had to be seen to be believed in. When he was
translating the Odyssey, he was at the same time writing his
Aims of Art, his Dream of John Ball, endless notes and articles
for the Commonweal, pamphlets and lectures on Socialism or
Architecture, as well as turning out design after design for
wallpapers, chintzes, glass, etc. He would be standing at an
easel or sitting with a sketchblock in front of him, charcoal,
brush or pencil in hand, and all the while would be grumbling
Homer's Greek under his breath — "bumble-beeing" as his
family called it — the design coming through in clear unhesi-
tating strokes. Then the note of the grumbling changed, for
the turn of the English had come, and he would prowl about
the room, filling and lighting his pipe, halting to add a touch
or two at one or other easel, still grumbling, go to his writing-
table,snatch up his pen and write furiously for a while — twenty,
fifty, a hundred or more lines, as the case might be. While
his hand was thus busied, the "man in the backshop" was
ruminating the next thing; for the speed of his hand would
gradually slacken, his eye would wander to an easel, a sketch-
block, or to some one of the manuscripts in progress, and that

would have its turn. There was something wellnigh terrify-
ing to a youthful onlooker in the deliberate ease with which
he interchanged so many forms of creative work, taking up
each one exactly at the point at which he had laid it aside,
and never halting to recapture the thread of his thought, or
to refer back to that which he had already written. It was as
though one had been admitted to the Olympian workshop of
an artificer god.

Questioned on his way of working and how it seemed to
him, he was at a loss for an answer, and finally said: "Well!
You see, one's head is rather like an everlasting onion ; you peel
off" the idea you see, and there's another underneath it, and so
on." I tried to get him to tell me at another time how a de-
sign took shape in his mind, but any sort of introspection was
strange and uncomfortable to him, and it was not easy to say.
Realizing that the inquiry was not wantonly made, or without
an anxiety to understand, however, he was patiently ready to do
his best. "When one began," he said, " of course one had to
learn all about the nets — you know what they are? — and that
sort of thing, just as one had to learn the rules of grammar, and
one had to keep them in mind while doing one's 'prentice-work,
but that's a long while ago, and I don't think about them any
more than I do about grammar. To confess the truth,although
I haven't forgotten as much about them as about grammar, I
have to dig for them when I want them. I know what's right
and what's wrong, but I couldn't always tell why. I look at the
space to be covered, and say to myself that it has to be repro-
duced on such and such a scale, and the repeats will run in such
and such a way, and that a rose or honeysuckle or whatnot
would be the sort of thing to suit it, and there the matter ends
for the time being. It goes somewhere at the back of my mind,
and when it comes up again, it may be as the whole thing, or
only the general hang of it and a bit of the detail. Sometimes
it seems to come out of the paper of its own accord, misty at
first and getting clearer each time I look at it. But whether it
comes as a whole or gradually, come it does, and that's all I can
say of it."

On another occasion, returning to a point already touched
upon: "Inspiration be damned for a yarn! It belongs to the
mystery-man's bag of tricks. If you have found work you can

do, and do it for all you are worth, inspiration will come when
it's called for. Mind you, I assume it's work you enjoy doing !
And, of course, nobody's always at his best; and, especially if
he sticks at one thing — say poetry — the inspiration — and that,
after all, is only to say the impulse — will halt at whiles, to say
the least of it. When that happens, he'd be better off if he had
something else to go on with. If you have to screw yourself up
to writing a poem when the poem isn't there to be written, or
flog yourself into chairmaking for the mere sake of your wages,
the poem or the chair is pretty well bound to suffer. . . . Don't
forget that art, if it mean anything at all beyond sheer honest
work well done, means the craftsman's pleasure in following
his craft, and the unaccountable quality that gets into his work
thereby."

Because he was ready to learn from anybody and every-
body who had anything whatever to teach him, old or young,
ancient or modern, of high degree or low, and was never back-
ward in acknowledging a debt, unintelligent and whitehanded
apostles of "self-expression" have denied him originality; just
as, on account of his outspoken admiration for the work done
during the Middle Age, or of his fierce attacks upon commer-
cialism, he has been dubbed sentimentalist by the ecstatics of
mechanism. But he took example by his predecessors and in-
struction or advice from his contemporaries with an equal and
an unfailing appetite, because, as has already been said, he
thought of the work first, last, and all the time. When he fixed
upon Master Nicholas Jenson the Frenchman for a precedent,
it was in order that by study and practice he might come
to understand the methods and principles upon which Jenson
worked as a type-designer, while tradition was yet fully alive,
so that he might apply these to his own practice, rather than in
order to imitate Jenson's type, to do which he would have re-
garded, and rightly, as a silly waste of time. What need was
there to imitate what was there already, to be taken ready-made
if that were all?

As to sentimentalism, no fairminded reader can fail to see,
alike in his writings upon art and in those upon social reform,
that he was practical in the extreme. That is, if it be "prac-
tical" to insist upon genuine material and good workmanship;
upon wares being honestly made for the use and pleasure of

man, not merely or primarily to sell at a profit; and upon such
a change in political and social arrangements as would favour-
ize, if not ensure, trustworthy products and fair dealing in their
exchange. There was no sentimentality in him, nor could he
stand it in others. Of a man who gushed about art, he said that
"a man who talks about art in that kind of a way is capable of
using the word as an adjective" ; and of one who affirmed that
he "strove to be one with the universe," he drily remarked:
"the danger is, one can't always tell whether one isn't making
over the universe until it is one with oneself!" A "twitter-
ing female," who thought she was pleasing him by professing
to be "raised above the sordid cares" of her household by
her absorption in music, provoked the rejoinder that "there
is more art in a well-cooked and well-served dinner than in a
dozen oratorios" ; and an ecclesiastic who unctuously declared
that he followed saintly example in being all things to all men,
was told that what he really meant was readiness to be any-
thing to any man. Indeed, he never went so near to a John-
sonian brutality as when angered by gush or affectation ; though
he usually endured in silence, unless the offender were a friend,
only breaking out as exemplified when the ordeal had been
unduly prolonged.

His attitude towards the Middle Age, again, was not in
any way determined by mere sentiment. It was the work of
the Middle Age, at once honest and invariably beautiful, that
appealed to him, and the colourful vigour, unequalled since,
which animated and was met by it. And his unanswerable
claim was that an epoch in which such work was done, even
when every possible drawback in the shape of disorder and
violence had been allowed for, must in some way or other have
been a better epoch than our own, for the productive craftsman
at any rate. Had he lived until now, by the way, he would have
been able to point out that industrialism does not necessarily
lead to order and respect for life or property ! That able-bodied
non-producers, idle of malice aforethought, are better off
nowadays than ever before, if it had any weight at all in his
eyes, told against the world of commercialism, and not in its
favour.

At no time did he advocate a return to or copying of the
Middle Age or any of its methods, even its methods of work,

jSFTHIS IS THE PICTURE OF THE OLD
HOUSE BY THE THAMES TO WHICH!
THE PEOPLE OF THIS STORY WENT^fe
HEREAFTER FOLLOWS THE BOOK IT J*
SELF WHICH IS CALLED NEWS FROM
NOWHERE OR AN EPOCH OF REST &fc
IS WRITTEN BY WILLIAM MORRIS,*?,*?

FRONTISPIECE TO " NEWS FROM NOWHERE " BY WILLIAM MORRIS : KELMSCOTT

MANOR, OXFORDSHIRE

Drawn by C. M. Gere. Engraved by W. H. Hooper. Border by Morris

further than these were eternal and universal in their validity.
What he did advocate, in unmistakable terms and with vehe-
mence, was that we should learn from the Middle Age what it
alone is able to teach us, not revive or imitate it through undis-
criminating admiration, and less yet condone its defects of any
kind for the sake of its picturesqueness. We should study it in
order to find out for our own guidance what conditioned the
lofty standard of work to which it attained, and learn how to
re-knit the broken threads of tradition, then intact, applying
our discoveries to the daily work of our own day, adapting
them where necessary to our increased mechanical powers and
wider desires.

His objection to machinery, again, was thoroughly prac-
tical, not being to machinery in itself but the evil use made of
it, and arising from no sentimental prejudice or fanciful ideal-
ization of the past. Here also, his attitude was determined by
quality of work. Where the employment of machinery entailed
no detriment upon the work, either directly or through the
enslavement of the men who did the work, he was willing to
accept and adopt it without reluctance or scruple. In addition
to "plenty of unnecessary work which is merely painful," he
frankly owned that there was "some necessary labour even
which is not pleasant in itself"; and here, said he, was the
legitimate sphere of machinery, going so far as to assert that
" if machinery had been used for minimizing such labour, the
utmost ingenuity would not have been wasted upon it."

For weaving plain cloth in quantity, that work being
monotonous and as well, or better, done by the power-loom,
the machine was in place ; but for patterned stuff's, where the
weaver could enjoy his work, besides doing it with a freedom
of execution and a liveliness of beauty no machine could equal,
none but handlooms ought ever to be employed. His type for
the Kelmscott Press was cast by machine, as there was nothing
to be gained by handcasting that he could see; "and from all
I hear, there wasn't much fun in it for the poor devils who
jogged and bumped the moulds about." If only the machine
could have dealt with his paper and ink, and given him the re-
sult at which he aimed, he would have installed a machine "as
lief as not, though I'm afraid Collins" — his leading pressman
— "would swear and cry his eyes out if he couldn't any longer

feel the type come home, or pause to let the ink sink in as it
should."

"It's the stupid way in which machinery is used that I ob-
ject to, and what goes with it. Whatever gives pleasure in the
doing — say weaving a jolly pattern — should be reserved for
the hand. A weaver at the handloom, so long as he's turning
out something that's worth doing, is decently paid and not
over-driven, has no bad time of it, I can tell you ! But the other
sort of thing, long stretches of calico or unpatterned cloth or
fleck-speckled commercial tweed, give that to a machine, and
be damned to it! But, mind you, even then, there's a danger.
You've got to have somebody to look after the machine, and if
he does that all the time, he soon becomes less of a man than
part of the machine. Then, the machine means cheapness in
one way or another, and cheapness in one way means cheap-
ness in another, and once cheapness gets in at the window,
quality's likely sooner or later to be thrown out of the door."

He condemned the machine, then, in so far as he did con-
demn it, upon two counts: inferiority of product, though this
was often less due to the machine in itself than to the profiteer-
ing use made of it; loss of pleasure and pride in his work on
the part of the producer, and the widespreading degradation
which thence ensues. The machine, in short, is a good servant
when properly used, but a bad master when used as it is.

That the loss of pleasure on the part of the workman had
but small appeal for his more prosperous hearers, he knew
only too well, and he therefore stressed it all the more. "The
hope of pleasure in the work itself, how strange that hope must
seem to my readers — to most of them ! Yet I think that to all
living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their faculties,
and that even beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong.
But a man at work, making something that he feels will exist
because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the ener-
gies of his mind and soul as well as those of his body. Not only
his own thoughts but the thoughts of men of past ages guide
his hands; and as a part of the human race, he creates. If
we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy
and eventful." Elsewhere he wrote : "Men whose hands were
skilled in fashioning things could not help thinking the while,
and soon found out that their deft fingers could express some

part of the tangle of their thoughts, and that this new pleasure
hindered not their daily work; for in their very labour lay the
very material in which their thought could be embodied; and
thus, though they laboured, they laboured somewhat for their
pleasure and uncompelled, and had conquered the curse of toil,
and were men."

His hatred of commercialism and acceptance of socialism,
in like manner, took rise from work, and were not rooted in a
reaction to the wrongs of Labour, or due to a doctrinaire ad-
herence to the Rights of Man. Though he felt keenly and wrote
bitterly of the foul misery that was in his time, and is in ours,
the accepted lot of the toiling masses ; though he abhorred the
stark injustice of social inequality, and the stupid wastefulness
involved in the political domination of class by class, his dis-
content had begun in the workshop, dye-room and weaving
shed, when he started out to do good work, to produce wares
that were honest in material, with a character in them derived
from the loving and thoughtful work put into them, perma-
nent and clear in colour as well as fertile and rich in design. At
every step he took or attempted to take, he was met and hin-
dered by debasement of material, dishonesty of method and
the degradation of workmen under commercialism. For a long
time he strove to maintain the fiction that he was a "dreamer of
dreams, born out of [his] due time," and to demand: "Why
should I strive to set the crooked straight?" But his own pas-
sionate craftsmanship, and resentment against the conditions
which destroyed craft-happiness for his fellow-men, thrust
him continually forward, and he was gradually driven into
taking up an extreme position by a growing realization that
nothing worth doing could be done towards remedyingmatters
through isolated efforts, through any political measures in-
tended to be merely palliative, or through the withdrawal from
the world-market of any well-intentioned group or commun-
ity. Short of a reform so sweeping and complete as to be
spoken of no otherwise than as a revolution, he came at length
to see no hope for the revival of craftsmanship, with all that
that implies. "As I strove to stir up people to this reform [of
the arts] I found that the causes of the vulgarities of society lay
deeper than I had thought, and little by little I was driven to
the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward

expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are
forced by our present system of society, and that it is futile to
attempt to deal with them from the outside. Whatever I have
written or spoken from the platform on these social subjects
is the result of the truths of Socialism meeting my earlier im-
pulse, and giving it a definite and more serious aim."

As to the coming about or bringing about the revolution
that must come, he held his mind open from the beginning to
the end. At no time a believer in the employment of armed
force, though fearing that the "other side" might resort to it
as a means of repression, and thereby drive the workers into
fighting in self-defence, and remembering our so-called Re-
formation, our Civil War and the French Revolution, with all
their bloodshed and cruelty — and, what was almost worse in
his eyes, the destruction of ancient buildings and other works
of art, the externalized and embodied thoughts and feelings of
bygone men — he neither hoped for nor desired anything more
speedy than a change of opinion, a growing realization that
"fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death," taking
shape as it progressed in legislative reform, perhaps, but more
certainly and effectively through a steadily altering attitude
towards work.

At no time did he regard himself as taking part in the
"Labour Movement," with which or with Trades Unions he
had never very much connexion or concern, but in a move-
ment for the reform of society as an organic whole, from which
every man of goodwill had much to gain, whatever his rank or
condition; not a movement for the overturn of one class and
the uplifting of another, excepting in so far as these might be
inseparable accidents of the enfranchisement of Man as a race
from the chains of ignorance, unfairness and lack of oppor-
tunity. He neither desired nor endeavoured to lessen the
amount of work, either in intensity or length of time, that any
freeman might have to put into the task of hand and brain; let
the task itself be made interesting, and the conditions under
which it was performed made something more than merely
endurable, and work would once again become a pleasure in-
stead of a penalty. Nor, otherwise than as incidental to a decent
life, did the question of wages excite him ; the wage-system,
indeed, was irredeemably evil, and no amount of amending

it would make it other than a makeshift and mischiefmaking
method of distributing the rewards of industry ; to end it rather
than to amend it must be the sole way of dealing with it. His
ideal and aim was always to lessen the non-humanity of labour,
in its monotony and lack of inspiration or incentive, and the
inhumanity of labour, in its immolation of man to machine, the
brutalization which comes of sordid surroundings in factory
and home, thwarting the growth and crippling the soul of man,
woman and child; to lessen these evils until they disappeared,
until the artisan could feel himself once more a freeman and
a craftsman, enjoying the unimpeded exercise of his fully-
developed faculties, proud of their fruits, and receiving a due
share of all the amenities of life.

Harnessing the powers of Nature to "save labour*' — that
is, to save the cost of labour for the benefit of the capitalist —
had not in any way improved the position of the labourer ; had,
indeed, done exactly the opposite. Toiling "consciously for
a livelihood, and blindly for a mere abstraction of a world-
market which they do not know of," the factory-hands of to-
day are in painful opposition to their craftsmen-fathers, who
"worked to produce wares, and to earn their livelihood by
means of them, and their only market they had close at hand,
andthey knewit well." To-day, their market is distant and the
consumer unknown to them, and the personal interest in their
work and its fate has departed. "Now, the result of their work
passes through the hands of half a dozen middlemen; then,
they worked directly for their neighbours, understanding their
wants, and with no one coming between them." They have
lost their freedom in two directions; "people work under the
direction of an absolute master whose power is restrained by a
trades union, in absolute hostility to that master," so that they
are held back on both sides from putting forth what powers
they may possess ; whereas aforetime, "they worked under the
direction of their own wills by means of trade guilds." They
have been set apart as a separate class, herded into the bricken
horror of mean streets, and cut off from all natural contact with
an unspoilt world. "Now, the factory hand, the townsman, is
a different animal from the countryman. Then, every man was
interested in agriculture, and lived with the green fields coming
close to his own doors. ... In those days, daily life as a whole

was pleasant, although its accidents might be rough and tragic.
Now, daily life is dreary, stupid and wooden, and the only plea-
sure is in excitement, even if that pleasure should be more or
less painful or terrible."

That misery was rife in the Middle Ages, as in every age in
the world's history of which we have knowledge, he freely ad-
mitted, but "it is clear that such misery as existed," said he,
"was different in essence from that of our own times ; one piece
of evidence alone forces this conclusion upon us; the Middle
Ages were essentially the epoch of popular art, the art of the
people: whatever the conditions of the life of the time, they
produced an enormous volume of tangible and visible beauty,
even taken per se, and still more remarkable when considered
beside the sparse population of those ages. The misery from
amidst which it came, whatever it was, must have been some-
thing totally unlike, and surely far less degrading than, the
misery of modern Whitechapel, from which not the faintest
scintilla of art can be struck."

Robert Steele and W. R. Lethaby, in their Quarterly Re-
view article upon Morris (October 1899), say: "It was the
taste for order and social harmony, and the love of beauty, feel-
ings essentially aristocratic and artistic, that drove him into
revolt against the social anarchy which is the result of Whig
laissez-faire under democratic conditions, when he compared
it with the regulated economy which was the theory of medi-
aeval life. Morris wasa Socialist because he rebelledagainst the
capitalist system, which imposes uniformity on craftsmanship
and treats the workman as a mere unit, and against uncontrolled
competition, which sacrifices beauty to cheapness, solid work
to seductive shams, and art to machinery. There was, in fact,
nothing modern or scientific about Morris's Socialism. He
turned to the Middle Ages, because what he detested did not
then exist, but he never formulated a scientific scheme of Social-
ism. Indeed, it is doubtful if he can be called a Socialist at all :
he objected as vigorously to the tyranny of collectivism as to
that of capital. We are inclined to hazard the paradox that, if
Morris was a Socialist, he was so just because he was so intense
an individualist."

His ideal of life as it should and might be is described in his
Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, and in many lee-

tures. A thumbnail sketch of it is given, incidentally and as it
were by accident, in his Roots of the Mountains : "Thus then lived
this folk in much plenty and ease of life, though not delicately
or desiring things out of measure. They wrought with their
hands, and wearied themselves ; and they rested from their toil
and were merry: tomorrow was not a burden to them, nor
yesterday a thing which they would fain forget: life shamed
them not, nor did death make them afraid."

APPRENTICESHIP

It so happens that, in the first year of Morris's apprentice-
ship as a printer, the Athenaeum — then the leading critical
journal in literary matters of the English-speaking world —
reviewed his Dream of John Ball, appraising him thus: "Any
critic who, having for contemporaries such writers as Lord
Tennyson, Mr. Browning, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. William
Morris, fails to see that he lives in a period of great poets, may
rest assured that he is a critic born — may rest assured that had
he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined
the author of the Return from Parnassus in despising the un-
academic author of Hamlet and King Lear. Among the band
of great contemporary poets what is the special position of him
who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the
sampler up to the epic, has now invented a system of poetic
socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose-
fiction . . . who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric,
never passes into excessive word-painting or into euphuism,
never speaks so loud as to be heard rather than overheard, but,
on the contrary, gives us always clear and simple pictures, and
always in musical language . . . of him who is the very ideal, if
not of the poet as vates, yet of the poet as 'maker' — the poet
who always looks out upon life through a poetic atmosphere,
which ... is as simple and clear as the air of a May morning?"
And the Athenaeum answers its own question by deciding that
he possessed "the richest and most varied endowments of any
man of our time."

This was the man who now set himself, as humbly and
thoroughly as though he had been a raw beginner, to seek out

FRONTISPIECE TO " A TALE OF THE EMPEROR COUSTANS DONE
OUT OF THE ANCIENT FRENCH " BY WILLIAM MORRIS

Drawn by Morris. Engraved by W. H. Hooper

and come to an understanding of the craft and mystery of
book-printing. That he spent a full year upon his preliminary
studies before turning his 'prentice hand to practising any one
of the many branches of the trade, is in itself good and suffi-
cient proof of the thoroughgoing care with which he worked.
Allowance has once more to be made, of course, for the un-
interrupted pursuit of his other activities. Not only did he
supervise and actively take part in the industries of Morris &
Co., write articles and notes for the Commonweal 'week by week
and occasionally for other publications, lecture and speak in
many parts of the country for the societies of which he was a
member, but produce two romances in the course of the same
year, original in style as well as in story, and make of these in
their material shape the object of experiments in printing.
Formidable as is this total, which might be increased were it
worth while, it left him time and energy for getting through
an amount of study and thought that would have occupied the
full working-year of an ordinary man.

His two new romances, I have said, were treated by him as
matter for experiment in printing. In so treating them, he had
a threefold aim in view: to see for himself what could be done
at the best with existing material and under existing condi-
tions; to make sure that no stone had been left unturned in his
determined quest for a complete and practical knowledge of
book-printing; last and least important, that he might have a
book of his own to show at the next Arts and Crafts Exhibition.

Though he had been driven by hard experience in craft
after craft into recognizing the Middle Age as the time of
times for an exemplar of method, no less than of material or of
result, it was not in him to take this or anything else for granted
when turning to an unfamiliar field, or to rest content with an
a priori condemnation of everything modern. With as pains-
taking a scrupulosity as that of Darwin in seeking for facts that
would test, or destroy if need be, his great hypothesis, Morris
had to make faithful trial of materials, methods and tools that
lay to hand in order to know exactly where and in what manner
they might be improved upon or put aside. And he had to
acquire a technical knowledge of every department of book-
printing before venturing to work at any one of them.

That the attention he gave to its printing detracted in no

49 E

way from the literary worth of the House of the Wolfings, the
first of the two romances to which allusion has been made, may
be seen from the enthusiastic reception it met with and the
place it still holds among his works. According to the Athen-
aeum, the author of this "superb epic" had invented "a form of
art so new that new canons of criticism have to be formulated
and applied to it. Without going so far as to affirm that this
book is the most important contribution to pure literature that
has appeared in our time, we may without hesitation affirm it to
be one of the most remarkable. . . . Mr. Morris has here en-
riched contemporary literature with a poetic prose of his own,
a prose that has all the qualities of poetry except metre ... a
style such as only one living man can ever hope to write. So
poetic, indeed, is the prose in this fascinating volume that
even the verse, fine as it is, seems to fade in the midst of it, as
the linnet's voice fades when the blackcap or the nightingale
begins."

Disinterested and unwelcomed homage was paid to the
book from another point of view. Soon after it appeared, a
friend found Morris in one of his explosive moments over a
letter he had received from a "fool of a German." The writer,
a distinguished archaeologist, said that he had hitherto re-
garded himself as being acquainted with all the quellen in ex-
istence, from which knowledge might be drawn with regard
to Teutonic life in its later tribal stage, when the Romans held
Gaul, but that he now found himself in presence of high learn-
ing that reduced him to humility. He therefore begged his
honoured, illustrious and most erudite colleague to indicate
the newly found quellen to which alone he could attribute the
miraculous and never-to-be-overpraised fullness and accuracy
of the redintegration before him. "Doesn't the fool realize,"
demanded Morris at the top of his voice, "that it's a romance, a
work of fiction — that it's all lies ! Hasn't the pedantic ass ever
heard of creative imagination, or known an artist of any kind?
. . . Ex pede Herculem, don't you know? . . . Just as old Owen
could fill out an extinct bird with only a bone or two to go upon,
an artist who knows his business can fill out an epoch on the
strength of half a dozen details. . . . Well, more than half a
dozen, but all the same . . . !"

For the printing of the book, Morris went again to the

5°

Chiswick Press, of which his friend, C. T. Jacobi, was then the
head. He could hardly have discovered a more kindred spirit
among working printers, or one who would have devoted so
much time and care to inducting him into the details of the
craft. With C. T. Jacobi at the Chiswick Press, with Emery-
Walker at home, he spent hours in comparing types and papers
and inks, as they were then, with one another and with those
in use in the early days of printing, as well as in studying the
methods of handling and dealing with them in the production
of a book.

Curiously enough, and by an undesigned coincidence, the
type finally chosen for the House of the Wolfings was the "Basel,"
in which a trial-page of the Earthly Paradise had been set in
i860. This "Basel" type had been adapted from Froben's
roman letter by Charles Whittingham II., and used by him
in printing a devotional work, the Rev. W. Calvert's Wife s
Manual, for Longmans in 1 854. Authorities upon type have
hitherto given the date as 1856, but that was the date of the
second edition. The punches for it were cut and the type cast
by William Howard of Great Queen Street, who had been a
seaman and is legendary as an eccentric, but was a fine example
of the highly skilled "little masters," now extinct as the Great
Auk. It had never been a commercial success, as may readily
be understood when its appearance is contrasted with that of
the average type of the 'fifties. Its heavy long esses, not used
in the House of the Wolfings, and the slanting hair-line of its ees,
which were, catch the eye at once, and one realizes how uncon-
genial they must have been to a generation that sat upon horse-
hair, admired antimacassars, and thought of Martin Tupper's
Proverbial 'Philosophy 'as inspired and inspiring poetry.

Time and thought were given to proportioning and bal-
ancing opposite pages in such a way as to make the opening
the unit, instead of the page, as well as to proportioning and
balancing the page in itself. The titlepage was treated in an en-
tirely new manner, though it has been so freely imitated since
as to have lost all appearance of novelty by now. Up to then,
the average printer had looked upon a titlepage as an oppor-
tunity for "display," and had prided himself on the variety in
size and fashion of the types he could cram into it. Even the
best printers had neglected its possibilities, and early printers

afforded no precedent, so that Morris's originality, on this
point at least, must pass unchallenged, as must the simple dig-
nity and real beauty achieved through unity of letter and the
manner in which it was disposed upon the page.

There was, at first, to have been a block to connect and har-
monize the massive title with the lighter imprint, but this gave
way in the end to a copy of verses, written to the exact measure
of the blank to be filled. This detail has not been so exten-
sively imitated, as it is not easy to find a poet who can shape
his poem to a given space, and still make it as limpid and spon-
taneous as though it had leaped into being as an improvisation.

Buxton Forman tells of meeting Morris by chance at the
Chiswick Press: "Presently down came the proof of the title-
page. It did not read quite as now : the difference, I think, was
in the fourth and fifth lines, where the words stood 'written in
prose and verse by William Morris.' Now, unhappily, the
words and the type did not so accord as to come up to Morris's
standard of decorativeness. The line wanted tightening up:
there was a three-cornered consultation between the Author,
the Manager, and myself. The word in was to be inserted —
'written in prose and in verse' — to gain the necessary fullness
of line. I mildly protested that the former reading was the
better sense, and that it should not be sacrificed to avoid a slight
excess of white that no one would notice. 'Ha!' said Morris,
'now what would you say if I told you that the verses on the
titlepage were written just to fill up the great white lower half?
Well, that was what happened !' "

Large-paper copies were printed in accordance with cus-
tom, the pages being carefully re-imposed for the sake of bal-
ancing them in a larger opening. No sooner did Morris see
the final result, however, than he vowed that never again would
he fall into the "large-paper" trap, as both type and page of
type had been dwarfed and greyed by the great expanse of sur-
rounding white.

His next experiment was made upon the Roots of the Moun-
tains, a longer, stronger and more assured work, declared by
Robert Steele to be "perhaps the finest story of Northern life
ever written. In this romance the poet touched the high-water
mark of his prose style; its archaisms, if such there be, are
exactly necessary for the expression of his thought, and the

narrative itself is exciting and well-planned." As a concep-
tion, Buxton Forman said that the Roots of the Mountains is
"no whit inferior to the House of the Wolfings. There are those
who award it the higher place. . . . For consistency of detail,
these men and women leave nothing to desire; for realization
of place, personality, costume and institution, the work is un-
surpassed; and in the one matter which in this case is very
important, the invention of battle incident, Homer himself
could not afford to give the modern poet points." Theodore
Watts-Dunton described the fighting in which the Yellow
Men are finally defeated and their power destroyed as "one
of the most splendid battlepieces in all poetry."

This was also printed at the Chiswick Press, and in the
same type as its predecessor, except that the e with a slanting
hair-line was replaced by an e in which the hair-line is level.
This change, made in deference to a widespread protest, was
immediately regretted by Morris, as may be seen from the
fact that he gave the hair-line of the e in his "Golden" type a
decided slant.

There is a difference in the pages also, which are even more
carefully balanced, while dropped heads, headlines and num-
bering in the top corner have been abandoned. Shoulder notes
have replaced headlines, and the pages are centrally numbered
at the foot. This makes a decided improvement in the open-
ing, and the precedent then set up was followed in all the books
printed at the Kelmscott Press. The titlepage is like that of
the House of the Wolfings, and bears a copy of verses, again
written to measure, but again betraying no trace of having
proceeded from anything else than an unpremeditated burst
ofinspiration.

Instead of large-paper copies, a number were printed on a
specially made Whatman paper, and bound in Merton printed
linen. The publishers, Reeves & Turner, were puzzled by
the new departure, and much perturbed as to the wording of
their advertisement, and in the end announced a "superior
edition of 250 copies." A certain amount of the special paper
was left over, and eventually used for the earlier book-lists of
the Kelmscott Press.

A translation from the Icelandic, the Story of Gunnlaug
Wormtongue, was also put in hand at the Chiswick Press, the

type chosen for it being a black-letter adapted from one of
Caxton's. But Morris lost interest in it before it had gone very
far, being by now much too deeply absorbed in type-design-
ing, papermaking and so on, to take it seriously. Work on it
dragged along until near the end of 1 890, and though it was
finally printed, it was never published. A few copies were
bound, and are to be found in private hands, but the bulk of the
edition remained in sheets until after Morris's death.

In addition to being absorbed in his preparations for the
Kelmscott Press, it is probable that "this master of all the lead-
ing crafts that can be named," as Buxton Forman called him,
unconsciously realized that his term of apprenticeship was
drawing to a close, and that it had become a waste of time for
him to bother about printing anything in any other type on
any other paper or in any other way than his own.

Of Morris's studies at this period, W. R. Lethaby, him-
self a man of no mean record, has written that they were "not
of the superficial look of things, but of their very elements and
essence. When . . . first producing textiles, Morris was a prac-
tical dyer; when it was tapestry, he wove the first pieces with
his own hand ; when he did illumination, he had to find a special
vellum in Rome and have a special gold beaten ; when he did
printing, he had to explore papermaking, inkmaking, type-
cutting, and other dozen branches of the trade. His orna-
ments and the treatment of Burne- Jones's illustrations were
based on his personal practice as a woodcutter. Morris was no
mere 'designer' of type and ornament for books, but probably
the most competent book-maker ever known. Indeed, it is a
mistake to get into the habit of thinking of him as a 'designer' ;
he was a work-master — Morris the Maker !"

It was as a maker of books that he studied and experimented,
not merely as printer or designer of type, or as both together.
He was these and more. By the time he turned to making his
own books — or even before that, by the time he entered upon
actual preparation of the materials for his book-making — he
possessed an intimate knowledge, and could appreciate the
capabilities, of each and every material that goes into a book,
either by itself or in relation to the others and their final em-
bodiment in the book, was familiarly acquainted with each and
all of the techniques which converge upon book-making, and

had acquired some considerable degree of working experience
in each. No one material was taken singly and by itself, nor
any one operation out of the entire process of making a book
from beginning to end.

To use his own words, he studied book-printing, and
"began printing books with the hope of producing some
which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same
time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the
eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form
in the letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calli-
graphy of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which
took its place. As to the fifteenth century books, I had noticed
that they were always beautiful by force of the mere typo-
graphy, even without the added ornament, with which many
of them are so lavishly supplied. And it was the essence of my
undertaking to produce books which it would be a pleasure
to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type.
Looking at my adventure from this point of view, then, I found
I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the
form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words,
and the lines, and lastly the position of the printed matter on
the page."

So had he studied and experimented, and when the time
came, so did he work.

PREPARATION

In describing Morris's work, while he was getting his materials
and tools together and preparing for the production of printed
books, we shall in the nature of things be driven to deal with
one thing at a time, and can only try to bear in mind while
doing so that he dealt with all things abreast. He subordinated
no material to another, no operation to another, but each and
all of these to the book. Though we shall have to start with his
type, and go on to his paper, ink, etc., it is throughout neces-
sary to remember that he did nothing of the kind.

This is all the more necessary for the reason that some who
quite honestly thought themselves to be following in his foot-
steps, or carrying out his teaching, have begun by designing a
fine letter, and had then to seek, not always with success, for
ink, paper, and the rest of it, with a view to the type and its
individual beauties. Others have started with a fine paper,
planning all else to do it justice. Examining his work in detail,
and unwarned, it would only be too easy in these days to think
of Morris's type, for example, in the abstract, comparing it
with some ready-to-hand standard or some ideal of our own,
without reference to all the other components of his books, or
the conditions under which they were produced.

Nor, if it comes to that, should any one of his books be
judged in isolation or for itself alone. Each in its turn was the
sum of the material and skill at his disposal, and an essay to-
wards realizing that which is never wholly to be realized: "for
you know all art is compact of effort, of failure and of hope, and
we cannot but think that somewhere perfection lies ahead, as
we look anxiously for the better thing that is to come from the
good."

FROM WILLIAM MORRIS S DRAWING FOR ENGRAVED TITLE PAGE
FOR KELMSCOTT PRESS I 893

Three types were designed, cast and used at the Kelmscott
Press: the "Golden," "Troy" and "Chaucer," named from
the books for which they were intended. A fourth was par-
tially designed, but neither finished nor named. Of these, the
"Golden" was an English or 14-point roman; the "Troy"
was a Great Primer or 18-point black-letter; the "Chaucer"
was a Pica or 12-point reduction of the "Troy." The un-
completed fount was a gothicized roman. We shall return to
them presently.

For all three founts, the punches were cut "with great
intelligence and skill," as Morris justly says, by Edward P.
Prince, who was in constant consultation with Morris while at
work on them. From what I can remember of the matter, it
would seem that punchcutting in his hands, though the instru-
ments used might be of greater precision, was essentially un-
changed as a process from that followed through by Garamond
or Howard. First came the cutting of the counter-punch —
whence "counter" for the interior whites of the letters. Then
the wrought-steel blank was screwed into a special vice, struck
with the counter-punch, and the metal outside the face of the
letter cut and filed away. When the face had been trued —
in Howard's day this was done upon an oilstone, the punch
being held upright in the angle of a special square — the punch
was duly tempered to the proper degree of hardness, and was
ready for the striking of the matrix. The dates of cutting were :
"Golden," January-December 1890; "Troy," June-Decem-
ber 1 891 ; "Chaucer," February-May 1892.

All casting was done at the Fann Street Foundry, then in
the hands of Sir Charles Reed & Son, Talbot Baines Reed
being Managing Director. As has already been noted, the
casting was mechanical; this being the sole intrusion of the
machine into the work of the Kelmscott Press, apart from sew-
ing thread and that sort of thing.

As an example of the pitfalls that await an historian, I may
cite a pencilled note in Talbot Baines Reed's own copy of the
Glittering Plain, now in the Technical Library of the St. Bride
Foundation Institute: "The types for this book were cast at
the Fann Street Foundry from matrices produced from punches
cut by French under Mr. Morris's personal inspection and
from his designs. The letters were modelled chiefly on those

of Jenson and the early Venetian Roman printers." And the
slip is all the more notable from the fact that a holograph letter
from Morris himself to T. B. Reed has been pasted into the
book by Reed, the postscript of which is: "Mr. Prince has
done most of the lower-case letters of my black type."

After deciding upon a roman letter to begin with, and select-
ing Jenson as teacher, Morris began to work upon his type in
December 1889. Miss May Morris tells "how the first type
was designed." "Mr. Walker," she writes, "got his people
to photograph upon an enlarged scale some pages from Are-
tino's Historia fiorentina, printed in Venice by Jacques Le
Rouge in 1476, and pages of all the more important fifteenth
century Roman types; these enlargements enabled Father to
study the proportions and peculiarities of the letters. Having
thoroughly absorbed these, so to speak, he started designing
his own type on this big scale. When done, each letter was
photographed down to the size the type was to be. Then he
and Walker criticized them and brooded over them; then he
worked on them again on the large scale until he got every-
thing right. The point about all this is — though it may be
scarcely necessary to dwell on a rather obvious thing — that
while he worked on the letters on this large scale, he did not
then, as is often done with drawings for mechanical reproduc-
tion, have the design reduced and think no more about it; it
was considered on its own scale as well; and, indeed, when the
design had passed into the expert and sympathetic hands of
Mr. Prince and was cut, the impression — a smoked proof —
was again considered, and the letter sometimes re-cut. My
father used to go about with matchboxes containing these
"smokes" of the type in his pockets, and sometimes as he sat
and talked with us, he would draw one out, and thoughtfully
eye the small scraps of paper inside. And some of the letters
seemed to be diabolically inspired, and would not fall into line
for a while, and then there were great consultations till the evil
spirit was subdued."

While at work, he had Jenson's own models to refer to;
indeed, he was rather adapting these to his purpose with aid
from Jenson than imitating Jenson himself. With manuscripts
for a starting-point, Jenson helped him on his way but did not
furnish him with a goal to reach and be at rest. As he had

already done in so many other crafts, he was laying hold upon
tradition, and "it is no longer tradition if it be servilely copied,
without change, the token of life." Indeed, if his letter be com-
pared with that of Jenson, it will be seen to be more Gothic in
feeling ; faintly, perhaps, but perceptibly so.

By mid-August, 1 890, eleven punches had been cut to his
satisfaction, and on August 2 7th he enclosed "a specimen (over-
inked) of as far as we have gone at present" in a letter to F. S.
Ellis. In October he wrote the same friend: "I have all the
lower-case letters, and have been designing ornamental letters
— rather good. I think." By the end of December, the whole
fount had been cut and was being cast, except for the upper-
case E and N. These missing letters were not ready until the
beginning of February 1 89 1; as may be seen by their absence
from the trial-page of the Glittering Plain, pulled on January
3 1 st. The complete fount consisted of eighty-one letters and
sorts, including punctuation-marks, figures and tied letters.
There were, of course, no "cock-ups" or "superior sorts" —
miniature letters or figures above the line — nor any accents.

He exulted over the trial-page as a token of success, but
was unsatisfied, and work had little more than begun to go
smoothly at the Press when he set himself to designing the
"Troy" fount. This was more or less based upon the types of
Schoeffer, Zainer and Koburger. He was delayed by illness,
but his hand was in, and when started he not only bettered his
teachers but worked more quickly, taking half the time for the
"Troy" that he had done for the "Golden."

When the resources of his press had revealed themselves,
and he felt free to plan his greatest achievement, the glorious
Chaucer, he was faced by the need for a smaller letter than
either the "Troy" or the "Golden." As a black-letter would
be more fitting than a roman for such a book, he decided upon
reducing the "Troy," and so produced the "Chaucer." Each
of these two later founts contained the same number of letters
and sorts as the "Golden." One or two other sorts were added
afterwards ; e.g. a leaf to supersede the "blind V as a paragraph
mark.

Still unsated, if not unsatisfied, he made some experimental
designs for a gothicized roman, based upon the first type of
Sweynheym and Pannartz, but did not go far with it. He

admired their type greatly: the Press had grown into an enter-
prise, however, and had intensified the already tremendous
pressure of his daily work ; then, though neither he nor anyone
else realized it in 1893, his physical powers were failing. Re-
peated attacks of what was called in those days the "Russian"
influenza, had undermined his magnificent constitution, and
laid him open to the insidious progress of the, as yet unsus-
pected, affection from which he died. Had it not been for all
this, the nameless fount would certainly have been completed,
and would probably have been followed by others ; how many,
and of what kinds cannot even be guessed at now; all we can
be sure of is that his fertile strength would not have been
allowed to go idle.

In the course of his researches, the paper used by the earlier
printers and their successors had been as minutely studied as
their types, and while he was experimenting upon the House of
the Wolfings and the Roots of the Mountains he had exhaustively
acquainted himself with all the papers then at his disposal. Of
modern papers, those which most plausibly promised to be
permanent in material and colour had not the surface and tex-
ture he required, while those which came anywhere near to
giving him what he wanted in these respects were unable to
stand the tests to which he put them. There was nothing for
it, then, but making or causing to be made a paper of his
own.

The history of paper, as he regarded it, had run parallel to
that of type; as papermaking had grown into importance as a
trade, and the demand for paper increased, so the average of
quality had been lowered. And, again as with type, the lowest
point in the worth of book-paper had been reached in the first
half of the 19th century. John Murray complained of its
deterioration in 1 824, and it went far lower than it was then,
when the commercialized application of science enabled paper-
makers to handle materials which could only be made use of
after the very life had been bleached out of them. There are
luxury-books, printed in the later 'sixties, that can be broken
across one's knee like a piece of rotten wood, and paper is now
being used which will go the same road at as great a pace.

It is not altogether a question of "hand-made" paper,
though paper that is to be permanent in substance and colour

is exceptional, to say the least of it, when made by machine.
The difference between paper made throughout by hand in the
oldfashioned time-devouring careful way from linen rags, and
paper made by machine — or even many so-called "hand-made"
papers of to-day — is very closely analogous to that between a
serge or tweed woven on a handloom from long-staple, unused,
unmixed wool, and a commercial serge or tweed woven by
machine from shoddy with an admixture of just enough new
wool to hold it together. And even if the material were pure to
begin with, it has been hurried through the processes of bleach-
ing and making with the aid of chemicals, until the purity of
its material is little more than a talking-point.

For paper such as Morris required there is but one pos-
sible material — unmixed linen rags — no other fibre in the
world being aught but a substitute. The longer and finer the
fibres, and the more complete their felting while wet, the
stronger will be the sheet of paper when dry. But the material
is by no means all; time and care must be given to every stage
of its handling: it must be thoroughly fermented, thoroughly
boiled and pulped, untouched by a chemical bleach, lifted
slowly and carefully by hand, sheet after sheet, by a skilled and
unhustled workman, employing a mould in which the wires
have not been woven with the monotonous regularity that
gives its uninteresting appearance to so much of the modern
"hand-made" paper ; and then it must be very gradually dried,
without artificial heat. In this connexion, as in all others, a
desire for speed is the enemy of true efficiency. Not that
Morris believed in taking things too easily, of course; here, as
always, it is the work and its welfare which counted for him :
the time spent upon it should be fully enough, but not more
than enough, to ensure its well-doing.

Another commercial demand — the demand for mechani-
cal uniformity and a superficial appearance of perfection in
the product — is all out as mischievous as that for speed. Pulp
which is lifted by hand has not and cannot have the uniform
thickness or dead regularity of surface — at the cost of homo-
geneity in substance — obtainable in that which has been
spread by machine. But this is not a defect when the paper is
dealt with by hand, and printed upon with good ink. It is,
indeed, far more of a virtue, for it allows of a play of light and

shade upon the page which gives it life, without any detriment
whatever to the unsophisticated clearness of the type-impres-
sion.

After much searching, Morris concluded upon a Bolo-
gnese model of about 1473, Italian papers having been from
the beginning what Fuller found them to be in the 17th cen-
tury: "Venetian being neat, subtle and courtlike; the French
being slender and slight ; the Dutch thick, corpulent and gross,
not to say sometimes also bibulous, sucking up the ink with
the sponginess thereof. ' ' And he also found a papermaker after
his own heart, the late Joseph Batchelor of Little Chart, near
Ashford in Kent, whose mill he visited with Emery Walker,
and convinced himself that Joseph Batchelor might be left to
pursue his experiments alone, being fully as enthusiastic and
thoroughgoing — where paper was concerned — as was Morris
himself. After he had reached this point, as has been said, he
never revisited the mill, though he kept up a written corre-
spondence until 1895.

In a letter to Morris, dated January 26th, 1891, Joseph
Batchelor says: "I am to-day sending five quires of paper
marked S, and also i\ quires marked H, and I wait your
further instructions. . . . The paper no doubt will be quite
usable and is Antique, but is not so like the Venetian you left
with me as I wish, and as I intend if I make another lot. What
I have made will take about a week to finish after I hear from
you which you like best, S or H."

It will be noted that the model paper is here spoken of as
being "Venetian" — another trap for an historian! — but this
was only a use of the traditional name for a good Italian paper.

As to which of the two, S or H, was preferred there is
no record, but both were used for the Glittering Plain, as the
size proved to be unsuitable to the Golden Legend, which was
intended to have been the first book produced.

Three papers altogether were made for Morris by Joseph
Batchelor, no other paper than these being used for any of the
Kelmscott Press books. Named from their watermarks, de-
signed by Morris, they were known familiarly as the "Flower,"
the "Perch" and the "Apple." The flower was a convention-
alized primrose; the perch had a leafy sprig in his mouth; and
the apple was an apple. In each case, the distinguishing mark

stood between the initials W. M. The first deliveries of each,
as invoiced from the Mill, were :

"Flower." February 12, 189 1. ioreamsAntiquePott,i6"
x 1 1", 12 lb. 480 sheets.
,, April 22, 1 89 1. 1 o reams Antique Medium,

16" x 22", 25 lb. 480 sheets.

"Perch." February 17, 1893. 1-1 6/20 reams Antique
Perch, i6£"x 23", 28 lb. 480 sheets.

"Apple." March 14, 1895. 25^ reams Apple Antique,
i8j"x 1 2 1", 1 8 lb. 480 sheets.

One experimental paper tried at the Press, but made for
Emery Walker years before, was much too hard to be usable.
In order to see what could be done towards an absolutely pure
and ideally made paper, it had been made from pure new
linen rags without admixture of any kind, especial care being
taken over the trituration of the rags, fermenting the pulp, and
all the rest of it. The outcome was a paper of wonderful beauty,
but with which nothing could be done. Hard and resilient as
spring-steel, tough and translucent as horn, it was dangerous to
handle when dry, its deckle-edge cutting like a razor, was un-
foldable, and no amount of soaking would render it soft enough
to be printed on.

As had been the case with Morris's fabrics, wallpapers,
stained glass, and so on, the new papers quickly found imi-
tators, not all of them over-scrupulous as to quality. On
October 30th, 1 895, Joseph Batchelor wrote Morris: "I find
that other makers are imitating our Antique Handmade paper.
For our protection, and as a means of giving my friends a guar-
anteed genuine article, I propose calling the paper the Kelm-
scott Handmade, subject, of course, to your approval. This
does not apply to watermarking in any way, but to the wrapping
and labelling of the paper." This proposal was at once and
willingly agreed to, and the same class of paper was made for
a good many customers with their own watermarks, but always
under the style of "Kelmscott Handmade." The Kelmscott
papers are still being made by Batchelor & Son, but with the
firm's own watermarks.

After paper, vellum. As has been told in its place, large-
paper copies became impossible after the House of the Wolfings^
and a "superior edition" of the Roots of the Mountains had been

printed upon a specially made Whatman paper. No similar
course could now be followed, as the Kelmscott Press books
were to be printed on the best paper that the world could then
show. Vellum was therefore the sole possible resource; and,
besides, to print upon vellum would mean re-knotting another
thread of the medieval tradition. With what remained over
from the stock long ago laid in for calligraphy, there was
enough whereon to print six copies of the Glittering Plain.
When more was asked for, no more was to be had from Rome,
the entire output having been firmly bespoken by the Vatican,
and there was the Golden Legend to be provided for, to say
nothing of lesser books. Excepting that one Italian maker,
Morris could hear of nobody in any country who could or
would supply the kind or quality of vellum he needed. He had
almost concluded upon a direct appeal to the Pope, begging
him to release a supply, on the ground that the Golden Legend
was a book in which he ought to be interested, when one of
his friends told him of a man who might be willing to try his
hand upon turning out the kind of vellum he required. This
was Henry Band, of Brentford in Middlesex, who already
made binding-vellum, as well as parchment, drumheads and
banjo-heads. To him went Morris in his usual way, and after
a few trials and failures they met with success — too late for
the Golden Legend^ however. Specially made from carefully
chosen skins of calves not yet six weeks old — after that age,
their skins must go into the tanpit, becoming the raw material
of gloves, boots, etc. — made specially thin, specially surfaced
and not faked with white lead, the Kelmscott vellum was an
exceedingly costly product. But this last was a detail that
Morris cared nothing about, so long as the material answered
the requirements of the work to be done.

Later on, when the growing needs of the Press outran the
capabilities of the Brentford works, recourse was had to another
firm, William J. Turney & Co. of Stourbridge in Worcester-
shire, to help out. "Kelmscott" and "Roman" vellums are
still being made at Brentford, but the Stourbridge concern
"gave up the manufacture many years ago, although the de-
mand for vellum still exists."

His experience as a dyer had prepared Morris for a fair
amount of trouble with his ink, but he met with far more than

ijrcipic LeeejsroH YpeRjvns

GRGCe mftYkOJvi meaeN brethren two,
Of wbicbe that oon was called Danao,
Chat many a son e bath of bis body wonne,
Hs swicbe false lovers of te conne.
Hmong bis sones alle tber was oon
Chat aldermost be lovede of evericboon.
Hnd wban this child was born, this Oanao
Shoop htm a name, and called htm Lino*
That other brother called was Sgiste,
Chat was of love as f als as ever htm liste,
Hnd many a dogbter gat be in bis lyve ;
Of which he gat upon his righte wy ve
H dogbter dere, and didc her for to calle
Tpermtstra, yongest of hem alle ;
The whicbe child, of her nativitee,

AN INITIAL WORD FROM THE " CHAUCER

even he had anticipated. Indeed, his ink was more trouble-
some than anything else, "as one might have known, seeing
that those damned chemists have a freer hand with it!" In all
matters of art, he held that the chemist had wrought infinite
mischief, without having a single gain to his credit; and if this
belief had not been warranted by previous experience, it most
certainly was justified by what happened now. After endless
trials, two inks — one English and one American — were found,
and it looked for a while as though these might answer, though
the English one had an undertone of red and the American
an undertone of blue. And the attitude of all the English
and American makers appeared to be: "Take it or leave it;
what's good enough for others is good enough for you!" It
was not until Jaenecke of Hanover came forward, however,
and offered an ink said to be made of the old-fashioned pure
materials that his troubles were over.

None of the others could understand that linseed oil was
indispensable, any other being a cheap and harmful substitute;
that "science" with its chemicals might simulate but could
not produce the same organic changes in the oil as those which
went on while it slowly matured in keeping; that after it had
been thoroughly matured, and then reduced by boiling to the
proper consistency, chemicals might free it from grease more
effectively than the rule-of-thumb treatment of pre-"scientific"
times with stale bread and raw onions, but "freed" it while
doing so of much else; that after the turpentine, boiled separ-
ately until, on cooling it on paper, it broke sharply and without
falling into powder, had been mixed with the boiled oil while
both were still warm, no chemical treatment or addition of this
or that would atone for a shortening of the six months' ripen-
ing the mixture must undergo, at the least, before being boiled
up again; that no other pigment than an organic lampblack,
animal for choice, must enter into the ink, depth and tone of
colour being regulated by the quantity of lampblack and by
nothing else; and, finally, that the lampblack must be ground
into the mixture of oil and turpentine until absolutely impalp-
able. To men who were accustomed to taking a chemical-
ized short-cut or the use of a chemicalized substitute wher-
ever that was possible, and could reckon upon disposing
of their product by the ton, such a demand appeared to be

65 f

a mad one, especially on the part of a relatively negligible
buyer.

Jaenecke stepped in where they did not care to tread, and
Morris, though he had cause to deplore and fear the influence
that Germany had exerted and was then exerting upon Eng-
lish art, thought and letters, was in this instance compelled to
rely upon the methodical thoroughness and artistic probity of
a German manufacturer. It is true that Jaenecke was a fellow-
socialist, but I cannot remember whether Morris knew this or
no. The ink was good in colour, and proved to be stable when
tested ; if it showed any trace at all of weakening under months
of daylight, it betrayed no unpleasing undertone. It was of the
proper consistency ; when a pinch of it was taken and the finger
and thumb parted, it might be drawn out into a thread of over
an inch long; yet it was thin enough to adhere to the paper
without an undue pull upon its surface or an undue drag upon
the type ; and it never worked foul, clogging the type or dirty-
ing the impression. That in the average press-room of those
days — or in these? — a little soft soap would soon have got into
it is another matter altogether; quickness of working was not
asked for at the Kelmscott Press.

With all its merits, Morris did not feel altogether satisfied
with it; he had had no opportunity of examining its ingredi-
ents or supervising its manufacture. There was nobody within
reach to work with, and his days were much too thronged to
allow of a lengthy trip to Germany, or he would assuredly have
taken up the study and practice of inkmaking with all the in-
tensity and industry he had given in their time to the mastery
of dyes and dyeing. But his days were already overfilled, and
his utmost energies taxed, by work to which he had committed
himself, and he was forced for the time to content himself with
testing the colour and stability of the ink by the severest means
at his command. The hand of death fell on him before he
could find a chance of doing more.

He was a born decorator, and the decorations of his books
were an integral part of their original conception ; they were
decorations in the truest and fullest meaning of the word,
organically harmonious parts of a designed page, and never
extraneous thereto, added or appliques as "beautification." He
could not have resisted the temptation to enrich his books with

ornament, or anything else that he made, for his mind and hand
were irresistibly architectural in all things, and unceasingly
fertile so long as he was awake. As chairman of a meeting,
his notes of the discussion were unconsciously covered with
sketches of flowers or fantastic scraps of design ; and the top of
a white-wood table, which used to stand on the platform of the
meeting-hall attached to his house at Hammersmith, was filled
from end to end and corner to corner with striking hints of
beauty or grotesquerie that were, in their own way, his com-
ments on what was being said.

"I have watched Mr. Morris designing the black and white
borders for his books," writes W. R. Lethaby. "He would
have two saucers, one of Indian ink, the other of Chinese white.
Then, making the slightest indications of the main stems of
the pattern he had in mind, with pencil, he would begin at once
his finished final ornament by covering a length of ground with
one brush and painting the pattern with the other. If a part
did not satisfy him, the other brush covered it up again, and
again he set to to put in his finished ornament. This proced-
ure opens up another idea of his, that a given piece of work was
best done once for all, and that all making of elaborate cartoons,
and then accurately copying into a clear finished drawing, was
a mistake. There was not only a loss of vitality which would
come by the interposition of more or less mechanical work, but
a drawing would not come right a second time, and would
always to his eye bear the impress of a copy instead of a thing
self-springing under his hand. It is difficult to realize the ex-
tent to which he felt this, but ... he seemed to have the idea that
a harmonious piece of work needed to be the result of one flow
of mind; like a bronze casting in which all kinds of patching
and adding are blemishes. . . . The actual drawing with the
brush was an agreeable sensation to him ; the forms were led
along and bent over and rounded at the edges with definite
pleasure; they were stroked into place, as it were, with a sensa-
tion like that of smoothing a cat . . . thus he kept alive every
part of his work by growing the pattern, as I have said, bit by
bit, solving the turns and twists as he came to them. It was to
express this sensuous pleasure that he used to say that all good
designing was felt in the stomach."

Of titlepages, borders, decorative initials and marginal

ornaments, he designed a total of no less than six hundred and
forty-four in little more than six years. In his earlier books, of
course, he had to make do with a smaller and less varied selec-
tion than he had at his disposal before the end. This was made
matter of complaint at the time by ill-informed critics, who
took the repetition of a design for a measure of economy, not
allowing for the fact that his enterprise was an experimental
one and not in the least a commercial speculation, or knowing
that no single penny was ever charged against the Press or any
book printed thereat for any of Morris's own designs. For
other people's work he paid, and paid well, but counted in his
own as part of the fun. Another silly complaint was that the
decorations did not "fit the text," or, in other words, were not
symbolic of its meaning; to this he would have retorted, as he
did when one of his romances was taken for an allegory, that
when he had anything to say, he said it in so many words
and plainly; that his decorations were not intended to be
illustrative or emblematic, but exactly decorations and no
more.

He started with one hand-press, an Albion, to which two
others and a proving-press were added later on. Except for
the change to iron from wood, and the substitution of levers for
thescrew, this press wasessentiallysimilar to Caxton's; indeed,
at the end of an hour or so, Caxton would have been comfort-
ably at home with the Press as a whole. As has been said,
Morris would have been ready to install a machine if it would
have done what he wanted, which it would not, or fitted into
his enterprise. No machine then existing, however, could have
dealt with his paper and ink in the manner he desired ; and it is
to be doubted whether there be one to-day. Then, even upon
the point of cost, advantage lay on the side of the hand-press.
Though the machine be cheaper for long runs, for two or three
hundred copies it is not, even when its far greater prime cost
and interest thereon are left out of account. When each and
every sheet is pulled with as much care as an etching, being
then tried over for the minutest fault, and replaced if it be in
the least defective, the machine is yet further handicapped. On
the hand-press, one, two, or five sheets may be pulled at the
same expense as though they were part of a thousand, which is
very far from being the case with a machine,

The type was inked with rollers, not pelt-balls, as it would
have been if Morris were merely imitating old methods.
Rollers distribute the ink more evenly and quickly than pelt-
balls did,even good sticky ink, over heavy type and strong-lined
woodcuts. Then, with rollers, there is less risk of "monks"
and "friars" — patches on which the ink is too dark or too light
for the rest of the page — though, as the Kelmscott pressmen
were in the front rank of their craft, this risk would not have
been a great one in any case.

Upon another point, that of the impression, there is an
irreconcilable difference between admirers of machine-work
and those who hold with Morris in his love of and belief in the
human hand, armed with the simplest possible tools. Printing
by hand on the oldfashioned hand-press, upon damped paper
which rests upon a relatively soft bed, each character leaves a
dent in the paper which ought to be only just perceptible when
the paper has dried again. To get rid of this denting, which
did not suit his distorted type, shiny paper and varnish-laden
ink, Bodoni dried his printed sheets between heated copper
plates under pressure. The machine, with its hard bed, leaves
an impression on the surface of the paper but no depression in
the paper, and this has come to be taken as an added beauty,
while a favourite word of condemnation for the older method
is to speak of its "embossing" the page.

"Witness has been borne against Morris," wrote Frank
Colebrook in the Printing Times , "in regard to what is called
the embossing of the back of the page, an evidence that the
other side of the page we are reading is also printed upon. The
effect is displeasing to most eyes, and it detracts from the
vividness of the letter which is being read, to the degree to
which it detracts from the whiteness of the intervening space
between the words. I don't think this concomitant of the
hand-press, with its enormous vertical pressure, is really grati-
fying to Morris, however indulgently he may look upon it for
its reminiscences of old-world books. It is simply the lesser of
two evils. If a perfect, dense, deep black is not to be obtained
without the drawback of the embossing of the back of the page,
well, on the balancing of advantages, he chooses to have the
more legible letter. He, indeed, procures so deep a black that
it can afford the sacrifice of a little white in the contrasting

spacing. ... A good deal, and perhaps too much, has been said
about this back embossing by critics of the Kelmscott. They
should put aside any idea that it appears in Morris's books
simply because he finds it in other books. If he were an imi-
tator for imitation's sake, he would copy the catchwords of
old volumes and the old long form of the small s. He adopts
neither of these." This is the commonsense view of a practical
up-to-date printer.

To talk of "embossing" at all, of course, is misleading, to
say the least of it ; every decent pressman does his best to mini-
mize the inevitable denting. But, as Morris so often pointed
out in other connexions, trying for the utmost attainable per-
fection in handwork results in something very different indeed
from attaining mathematical precision by means of a machine ;
in the one, there is human effort, life\ in the other, there is
long-distance calculation and the interposition of a feelingless
metallic efficiency between the hand and its work, which in
matters of art means death.

I have spoken of the difference between machine-worship-
pers and believers in the human hand as an irreconcilable one ;
and irreconcilable it is until the mechanically minded realize
that, while there is room for them and to spare in the world of
material necessities, there is none for them in the world of art,
where the human brain and hand attempt an unattainable per-
fection, and find their joy in the attempt. It is, after all, the
difference between those who play football for the sake of the
game and those who play it for the sake of the win ; between
those who play bridge as an intellectual stimulant and recrea-
tion and those who play it with a sordid eye upon the stakes.
To the mechanically minded, irregularity in thickness of paper
and relative inequalities of surface in the printed page are un-
condonable defects; to Morris and his like they are signs of
living effort, and therefore easily to be pardoned and put up
with, even if they are not to be sought for and admired.

It is, after all, the old quarrel between the Gothic and the
Renaissance. To those who condemn the mechanical short-
comings, as they hold them to be, of Morris's printing, the
work of the French, English and Italian Primitives, the glori-
ous beauties of Santa Sophia and the whole Byzantine tradition,
the spirited strivings of pre-Pheidian Greek sculpture, or those

of the great builders of the 13th and 14th centuries, would
necessarily appear to be barbarous, puerile, inept.

And it is to be remembered that the inevitable denting was
in Morris's mind when he designed his type, as it was in that of
Caslon. Print from Caslon's type upon modern paper with a
modern press, contrast the effect with that of the same type in
Caslon's own specimen-sheets, and the loss is seen to be enor-
mous. So, too, with Morris's "Golden," and still more with
his "Troy" or "Chaucer," when treated in any other way than
the Kelmscott Press way.

This brings me to the question of reproductions. Even the
best conceivable reproduction does an injustice to its original,
and is to be put up with in the absence of the original; to be
taken as an appetizer towards the study of that original, and
not as a substitute for it. To reproduce a Morris page, or any
other Morris design of any kind, in the true sense of the word
reproduce^ is, indeed, impossible in the absence of identical
material and an identical method of handling it. Less yet is it
possible to imitate them to advantage. They are to be treated
as Morris himself treated the work of his predecessors, ad-
mired and loved for their own sake, and studied for that which
may be learned from them, but not imitated. Imitation is, in
any case, unintelligent, the recourse of none but the cowardly
in art or the unscrupulous in commerce, anxious to be in the
fashion or follow the market.

THE MASTER-PRINTER

Now that nearly thirty years have gone by since the Kelmscott
Press ended its work and passed into history, that its repu-
tation has grown higher with time, and its importance more
and more widely recognized, the apparent insignificance of
its beginnings can only be realized with an effort, and it seems
incredible that its rapid growth and ultimate repute should
have been wholly unforeseen.

Yet, when it first opened its door, the front-door of a tiny
cottage, nobody — and, least of all, its founder — anticipated
any such development as that which led, in the seven years of
its activity, to the production of no less than fifty-two works
in sixty-six volumes, one of them twice printed, ranging in
size and moment from the mighty Chaucer down to the dainty
little Gothic Architecture^ counting in all up to 18,234 copies,
and representing a turnover of more than £50,000. Nor did
Morris dream that what he was doing would at once and for
ever affect the printing of books throughout the civilized
world ; that within a year he would be hailed as the Master-
Printer of his age by Theodore de Vinne and other authori-
ties; that State printing-offices, like those of Portugal and
Russia, were to print special volumes in his honour; or that
the books to be printed by him were henceforth to be fought
for in the auction-room, and held in high esteem among the
choicer treasures of great libraries. He foresaw nothing of
all this, and thought of his "adventure" as an experiment
in book-making for the mere sake of seeing what could be
done.

His original idea, it will be remembered, had been to have

no more than a composing-room of his own, all press-work
to be done at Emery Walker's offices in Clifford's Inn. As
his knowledge of printing grew, however, and his practical
interest in its working details deepened, he began to see that
there were far too many technical risks and difficulties involved
in such a plan ; and that, in addition to these, there was the fact
that printing at a distance from his home would make it much
harder for him to watch over the work as it proceeded.

On January 12th, 1891, therefore, his type and paper
being nearly ready for delivery, a cottage was taken at No. 1 6
Upper Mall, Hammersmith, a few doors eastward of his resi-
dence. The necessary furniture and fittings had been ordered
beforehand, and the Kelmscott Press came into being. That it
should be thus named was inevitable; whatever came near to
Morris's heart must be named after Kelmscott Manor, near
Lechlade on the Upper Thames, of which he had written : "It
has come to be the type of the pleasant places of earth, and of
the homes of harmless, simple people not overburdened with
the intricacies of life; and, as others love the race of man
through their lovers or their children, so I love the Earth
through that small space of it."

He had offered a partnership in the new undertaking to
Emery Walker, who, with his usual modest self-effacement,
declined what he felt as an honour. From beginning to end,
however, he acted as and virtually was a partner in all but
name, taking his full share in the labours, cares and anxieties
involved, as well as in the immaterial dividends that were paid
in pleasure and the credit for good work well performed.

One upstairs room of the cottage was fitted with racks,
cases, imposing-stone, etc. ; another housed the single press,
bought secondhand ; the rooms on the ground-floor were util-
ized for stores. William Bowden, a recently retired master-
printer of the old school, who had printed News from Nowhere
for Reeves & Turner, was to have been the entire staff, acting
as compositor and pressman by turns. It was made evident,
even from the start, however, that there was too much work in
sight for one pair of hands, and he was joined a week or two
later by his daughter, Mrs. Pine. William Henry Bowden
occasionally dropped in to help his father, and was regularly
added to the staff on February 18. Before March was out,

another addition was made, a pressman named Giles, who left
when the first book was finished.

"One of my earliest recollections of William Morris," says
W. H. Bowden, "is of the starting of the Press. When the
type came in from the founders, he was very anxious to help lay
it in the cases; but not having served his time to the business,
more often than not put the type into the wrong box. It was
very amusing to hear him saying to himself: 'There, bother it ;
inthewrongboxagain!' But he was perfectly good-humoured,
and presently ran off and came back, bustling up the path —
and in my mind's eye I can see him now — without a hat, and
with a bottle of wine under each arm, with which to drink
the health of the Kelmscott Press. And, without ostentation,
I think I may say that there must have been considerable virtue
in that wine if the Kelmscott Press is to be judged by its works,
which in so short a time established such a world-wide repu-
tation!"

Writing to a friend at the time, after telling him the good
news that the Press had made a start, and rejoicing thereat,
Morris in the next breath confesses to an involuntary recoil
that is illuminative of the man : "When I saw my two men at
work on the press yesterday, with their sticky printer's ink, I
couldn't help lamenting the simplicity of the scribe and his
desk, and his black ink and blue and red ink, and I almost felt
ashamed of my press after all!"

Caxton's translation of theG olden Legend 'was to have been
the first book printed, and the "Golden" type had been de-
signed for it, but when the first lot of paper was delivered it was
found to be too small for the purpose. Only two pages, out of
over a thousand, could be printed at a time, and Morris, im-
patiently desirous of handling a finished book from his own
press, resolved to put a smaller book in hand to go on with.
The Story of the Glittering Plain, which had appeared in Nos.
81/84 of the English Illustrated Magazine, but had not yet been
published in book form, was available and of the required
length. After a slight revision, this began to be set up at once.

Some decorated initials had already been designed for the
Golden Legend by Morris, and had been engraved by George
F. Campfield, an old friend of his, a pupil of Ruskin at the
Working Man's College, and the first employe to enter the

service of Morris, Faulkner, Marshall & Co. These, though
rather large for the page of the smaller book, would do to go
on with, but a new border was necessary. This was at once
designed by Morris, and engraved by W. H. Hooper, and on
January 31st a trial-page was pulled amid great excitement.
As has already been noted, the upper-case E and N had not yet
been received from the founders, and do not appear in this
page. The lower-case g was found to be unsatisfactory, and
was at once discarded and replaced.

William Harcourt Hooper, who thus came into connexion
with the Press, was one of the last of the great wood-engravers
who were at work before any photographic or other mechani-
cal method of reproduction had yet been dreamed of. They
took to and were trained for wood-engraving as a trade, but for
such of them as were artists it became an art; their starting-
point and training were those of the craftsman, and they were
consequently free from the tendency to mannered self-assertion
which is the besetting sin of wood-engravers nowadays, when
the craft of wood-engraving having been killed out as a craft,
they must of necessity and in their own despite be go-to-ists to
some extent. In the earlier part of Hooper's career, he had
engraved Sir John Gilbert's drawings for the London Journal,
and from 1850 onwards those of Tenniel, Fred Walker, Leech,
du Maurier, Keene, Millais, Leighton and others for the Illus-
trated London News and for Punch. He had been living in
comfortable retirement for some years, but could not resist
the lure of exercising his art once more upon such tempting
material. He now offered his help, and from this time until the
Chaucer had been completed had as much as he could do to
keep up with an increasing demand upon his willing services.
It is a question as to whether he or Morris were the more for-
tunate in their conjunction. Without Hooper, the work of
Morris and Burne-Jones would not have been done the justice
it deserved and received. Without his association with the
Kelmscott Press, Hooper and his earlier work might by now
have been forgotten.

Twenty copies of the Glittering Plain were to have been
printed for distribution among Morris's personal friends.
There was as yet no thought of offering any for sale, nor did
Morris desire that any public notice be taken of what he still

75 '

regarded as a privateand personal experiment, an "adventure"
of which the success or failure from his pointofview was neces-
sarily indeterminate as yet. Rumours with regard to the new
press had begun to get about, however, and on February 2 1 st,
the Athen<e #/#announcedthat : "Mr. William Morris is getting
his press into working order. The printing of the Golden Legend
will be preceded by that of . . . the Glittering Plain. A very
limited number will be printed as the first issue of the Kelms-
cott Press, by which name Mr. Morris calls his newenterprise."
This gave rise, to Morris's outspoken annoyance, to a great
number of inquiries and many pressing requests that copies
be made available for purchase. After much heartburning,
and with a certain amount of misgiving, he finally decided to
print what then seemed to him the very large number of two
hundred copies; twenty, as before, for his friends, and a hun-
dred-and-eighty for sale through his regular publishers, Reeves
& Turner. His misgivings were not in the least with regard
to the possibility of selling so many copies, which was already
assured, but as to whether the Press was as yet sufficiently well
organized and prepared to do the work as he wanted it done,
and especially as to whether a pressman could print the same
sheet so many times over at a stretch without succumbing
to the monotony of his task, and failing to exercise the same
scrupulous and minute care throughout. Besides, the initials
having been designed for a larger page, he could not at once
reconcile himself to their use for a smaller one. However, all
his objections were overcome; the first sheet went to press on
March 2nd, and thenceforward the work went steadily on.

If Morris had resented the Athenaeum s first notice of the
Press, his annoyance may be imagined when the same paper,
in its issue of April 4th, published a series of paragraphs,
founded upon what he had regarded as a frank and confidential
talk with a friend, in which the Press and his projects in con-
nexion therewith were fully described. "The Glittering Plain"
said the Athenaeum, "will be published by Messrs. Reeves &
Turner at a net price. Only two hundred copies will be struck
off, of which 1 80 will be for sale, and four or five copies on
vellum." The immediate effect of this announcement was that
Reeves & Turner were overwhelmed with orders and in-
quiries, and that the 180 copies on paper were sold out within

the next few days, as well as two of those upon vellum. This
in spite of the fact that no price had been stated. No price,
indeed, had yet been fixed.

Now that it had to be done, the price for paper copies
was fixed at two guineas, and that for vellum copies at fifteen
guineas. These prices covered little more than the actual cost
of the sold copies, after an exceedingly moderate allowance
had been made for their proportionate share of overhead ex-
penses. Depreciation of plant was not reckoned, nor the cost
of gift copies; for Morris, as the Press was his own private
affair, an experimental venture entered upon for the sake of
turning out books worth looking at, and not for pecuniary
profit, these were matters which concerned him alone, to be
paid for out of his own pocket. Later on, when the Press had
grown too big to be thus treated, and the book-loving public
had shown that it was more than ready to pay fair prices for its
products, the friends and assistants who took charge of the
business side of things looked out against his losing money,
seeing no reason for his being out-of-pocket in addition to giv-
ing away his personal work — and such work ! — for nothing.

Anonymous attacks began to be made on him almost at
once, nevertheless, for "preaching Socialism and going away
to prepare books which none but the rich could buy." Apart
altogether from the fact that, so soon as the Press had been got
into running order, books were printed and sold at prices
which brought them well within the reach of others than "the
rich," it must again be emphasized that Morris founded his
Press as a personal experiment, in order to see what could be
done at his own expense in the way of producing a decent book,
and that he had never contemplated the sale of any book what-
ever, at any price, until forced to do so by finding that there
was a real and widespread demand for his books, and that
people were prepared to pay for them. Then, being a sens-
ible man — and, as he was proud of being, not only a manufac-
turer but a shopkeeper in the true medieval way; a "poetic
upholsterer," as Lord Grimthorpe dubbed him, to his delight
— he, quite naturally, did not snap his fingers at the proffered
assistance towards making his experiment a success.

Here are the actual prices charged from first to last: one
book at £20 ; one at £9, 9s. ; two at £6, 6s. ; four at £$ , 5s. ; one

at^4j4s-> twoat ^3, 3s. ; fifteen at £2, 2s.; fifteen at 30s.; four
at 25s.; four at 21s.; three at 15s.; one at 12s.; four at 10s.;
fourat 7s. 6d.;andoneat 2s. 6d.

As the editor of the Printing Times, Frank Colebrook, a
practical and experienced commercial printer, pointed out,
Morris was animated by the same motives in preaching Social-
ism and in founding the Press : "He sets up his press, not really
to make money, whether out of the rich or out of the poor, but
to produce a book as beautiful as he can make it. When he has
paid a high price for his paper . . . when he has used black ink
at about 10s. a pound; when he has designed his three types
and had them cut ; when he has paid fair wages to his workmen,
from whom he does not require a longer week than forty-six-
and-a-half hours — nor, indeed, bind them down to any speci-
fied time — he is not able to sell the product of all this for a less
sum. And what a service he renders to workmen everywhere
in demonstrating that people will lavish money to buy books
upon which master-printers and workmen have lavished care !"
And he sarcastically comments: "This dreamer of dreams
positively trades and makes money; lavishes it on the needy,
no doubt; but the fact remains, he makes money, while the
fitness of things demands that from the moment of his start in
business, he, the poet, shall be borne softly and serenely away
towards the vast waters of the Insolvent Sea! His success is a
paradox, almost an impertinence. Commonsense inclines to
resent it!"

"It has frequently been urged against the Kelmscott Press
that its usefulness as the pioneer of a new movement has been
largely impaired by the high charges Morris made for his
books," A. L. Cotton said in the Contemporary Review. "The
fact is, of course, that Morris made no pretence of publishing
cheap books, and the sale did no more than compensate him
for the heavy expenditure of time and money which he in-
curred. Paper, ink, binding were the best procurable, to say
nothing of the ornaments and decorations, and he could hardly
have charged a smaller sum for his volumes than he actually
did."

According to the colophon, the Glittering Plain was fin-
ished on April 4th, but this was naturally the date on which the
last forme was locked up ; the last sheet had still to be printed,

and the book to be bound; the actual date of publication was
May 8th. The average interval between colophon-date and
publication-date was, in the case of octavos, about a month ; in
that of larger books, longer. In the case of the Dream of John
Ball (May I3th-September 24th), it was the frontispiece by
Burne-Jones which delayed matters; this had to be re-drawn
under the artist's direction from that prefixed to the first edi-
tion, Morris's border designed for it, both of these engraved,
and the blocks printed from, after the body of the book was off
the press. Other cases of delay were: News from Nowhere
(November 22nd, 1892-March 24th, 1893), kept back for
frontispiece, from drawing by C. M. Gere, with border by
Morris, depicting the old manor-house on the Upper Thames
after which the Press was named ; the Wood beyond the World
(May 30th-October 1 6th, 1 8 94), which also had to wait for its
frontispiece; and the Well at the World's End (March 2nd-
June 4th, 1896), the last sheet of which had to stand by until a
press was available, two being fully occupied upon the Chaucer
and a third upon the Earthly Paradise.

The Well at the World's End, by the way, was longer in
hand than any other book, even the Chaucer, being "in the
press" for over three years. Trial-pages, including one in a
single column, were set up and pulled in September 1892, and
the first forme went to press on the 16th of the following
December. The ordinary edition was then being printed for
Longmans at the Chiswick Press, and the Kelmscott Press
edition was set up from the sheets of this, which was ready
for publication in 1894, though not actually published until
October 1896, being held back in order that the Kelmscott
Press edition might be the first. How to account for the length
of time during which the Well at the World's End was in the
pressisnoteasy after so manyyears, but part of itwas due to the
fact that, according to the original scheme, A. J. Gaskin was
to have illustrated the book, and when this idea had been aban-
doned, Burne-Jones's four designs were long in hand. Then,
many other books were in hand, and Morris was designing a
profusion of ornaments for them, doing a good deal of trans-
lation, writing his Water of the Wondrous Isles, and was not
idle in other ways. His "tidymindedness," already referred
to, had probably something to do with it; the book had been

written, and to that extent was gone from the forefront of his
mind; new tasks encroached upon his attention as they came
up, one after another — the Chaucer more than all. Until the
very end, each and every book in its turn was a high adventure,
offering new problems and therefore a renewed excitement,
and a glance at the list of books printed will serve to show that
there was no lack of "adventures" between 1892 and 1896.

At some time during March 1891 a trial -page of the
Golden Legend 'was set up, pulled and approved, and the book
was put in hand. In April came the first delivery of the larger
size of the "Flower" paper, and it was possible to send the
first sheet to press. Vellum of the proper size and in sufficient
quantity was not yet available, and the Golden Legend is the
only important book printed at the Press of which there are no
copies on vellum. Before the Golden Legend was finished, and
in time for the Recuyell of the History es of Troye, a supply of the
necessary vellum was being furnished by Henry Band. By
May 1 ith, fifty pages of the Golden Legend were in type, and
the first sheet had been printed. But for an accident, it would
have been printed sooner. Morris went into the Press one
morning, towards the end of April, and found his unhappy
staff in the depths of despair; a deal slab, overladen with page-
galleys, had collapsed, and the outcome of many days of labour
had gone into "pye." As W. H. Bowden told the story:
"Morris is as serene as ever. 'Oh, then, this is what you call
pye?' he exclaims. If there must be pye at the Kelmscott
Press, he seems interested and almost pleased to see it; to be in
at the death. It is all in the day's work. 'Ah, well,' he says, 'we
must put it straight. I came in to tell you that you must take
a holiday on May 1st, Labour Day.' And with that he turns
on his heel and away." The accident, be it noted, was due to
faulty material and not carelessness, or "serene" would hardly
have been the word that fitted.

No sooner was the Glittering Plain all up than Poems by the
Way was put in hand. Upon this and the Golden Legend, the
three compositors were fully occupied until the end of May,
when the Press moved to a new abode.

On May 8 th, the Glittering Plain, the first book to be
printed at the Kelmscott Press, and the only book to be wholly
printed at No. 1 6 Upper Mall, made its public appearance.

COLOPHON FOR QUARTO BOOKS OF THE KELMSCOTT PRESS

Booklovers were delighted with it, not only for its own sake but
as a herald of better things to come. Morris himself was less
pleased with it than might have been expected; as an experi-
ment he had learnt much from its making, and there was a thrill
in handling his first completed book, but he saw and felt the
points upon which it fell short of his ideal far more keenly than
those upon which it might be called a success.

Two things, at least, had now been proven by experience:
that a good pressman might be trusted to retain the freshness
of his interest over the pulling of three hundred copies; and
that there was what somebody called at the time a "ready-made
Morris public" for at least that number. Three hundred copies
was the number fixed upon for Poems by the Way, and became
the standard number for an average book, only being exceeded
in special cases.

Another thing that had come to be obvious was that a
larger staffand increased accommodation must at once be pro-
vided, if work on the Golden Legend 'were to proceed at a reason-
able rate, and especially if a succession of smaller books were
to be produced while it was in progress. Then, Morris's appe-
tite had been whetted, and he was dreaming of bigger things,
designing his "Troy" type, having the "copy" prepared for
Caxton's Recuyell of the History es of Troye, so that it should be
ready as soon as the type was available, and already talking of
a Chaucer. The original cottage was given up, therefore, and
larger premises taken at No. 14 Upper Mall, next door to it.
"Sussex Cottage," the new home of the Press, and that in
which the main part of its work was to be done, was half of a
large old family-mansion, partitioned off, of which the other
half, "Sussex House," was occupied by the photo-engraving
works of Walker & Boutall. The whole mansion, re-united,
is now in the hands of Emery Walker, Limited. No. 1 6 re-
verted to its original use as a private dwelling, and it is thus
occupied at the time of writing.

William Bowden definitively retired when the move was
made. W. H. Bowden became overseer, and several new
compositors were engaged; Thomas Binning, late of the
Commonweal, being among them. Binning was elected father
of the chapel; he was a staunch trade-unionist, and it was
probably due to him that the London Society of Compositors

81 G

approached Morris, asking him to unionize the Press, in spite
of the fact that it was outside the Union district, and that no
obligation lay upon him to do so. His reply was to the effect
that the Press was not a commercial enterprise, that he already
paid higher wages for shorter hours than those recognized by
the Union, that the matter was one for his men to settle as they
chose, and that he would bring no pressure to bear upon them
either in favour of the proposal or against it. When the Union
authorities approached the men, the latter discussed the whole
question, in chapel assembled, and agreed to go in as a "shop"
but only as a "shop." That is to say, there must be no discrim-
ination against non-union men, who must go in on the same
terms as the others who were already members, and also that
Mrs. Pine must be enrolled with all the rest. No woman had
ever yet been admitted to the Union, and its authorities ob-
jected to setting up a precedent on the point. The men stuck
to their guns, however, and carried the day. Mrs. Pine duly
becamethe first woman-member of the L.S.C., though she did
not long enjoy the honour, as she followed her father into re-
tirement soon afterwards, but she had made her name historic
and opened the way for others.

Poems by the Way went to press during the following month,
and the last forme was locked up on September 24th, the book
being published on October 20th. It was the first book to
be finished at No. 14, and the first printed in black and red.
The Golden Legend, of which the first volume was finished on
October 1st, was printed entirely in black, as the Glittering
Plain had been, and as the following were to be : The Nature
of Gothic, Biblia Innocentium, the Life of Wolsey, and the first
(but only the first) volume of Shelley's Poems. Two books
only were printed in three colours — black, red and blue —
Laudes B.V.M. and Love is Enough. All others were printed
in black and red. Wilfrid Blunt's Love Lyrics and Songs of
Proteus has the initials in red, at Blunt's express request, but
the experiment was not repeated, as Morris did not care for
the effect produced.

A second press was bought in November, as work on the
Golden Legend was dragging along, and books were beginning
to get in one another's way. There were so many that Morris
wanted to put in hand by now, and he could not bear that work

should be hurried. W. H. Bowden describes his attitude to-
wards the work, as it was then and all the way through, from
the standpoint of an employe : "What sort of man was Morris
to work with? Well, if all employers were like him, we should
hear of no more troubles between employers and employed !
He was generous and fair, and not indifferent to the feelings
and welfare of those who served him. His idea was that a man
should not be a working-man as we understand the term, but
that he should be a workman in the best sense of the word ; that
he should take a high interest in his work; that he should have
good surroundings ; the very best materials to use ; and should
not be harried at his work by the everlasting thought of how
the j ob was to pay him. The spirit of competition never entered
the doors of the Kelmscott Press. Everyone had plenty of time
allowed him, so that he might put forth his best effort. No man
ever detested a botch more than William Morris ; he was a firm
believer in the oldfashioned maxim that if a thing is worth
doing at all, it should be done well. I recollect once telling
Morris that a certain typographical correction, if done accord-
ing to his directions, would take a long time. His reply —
and it was characteristic — was: 'I don't care: if it takes three
months, it must be done !' He knew no such word as 'can't.'
He had a ready way with difficulties, and often turned a seem-
ing difficulty into a real advantage. From the nature of the
work we had many difficulties to contend with; but when a
difficulty had been surmounted, his hearty: 'I like that! It
is just what I wanted!' was sufficient reward for the previous
trouble and tediousness. He was a man of splendid energy, and
it did one good to come in contact with his fine breezy nature."
As a contrast in points of view, the verdict rendered by the
head of a large commercial printing works, with some preten-
sions to artistic leanings, whom I once took over the Press, may
here be cited. He watched the compositors carefully setting,
and still more carefully justifying, line after line; looked with
a discontented eye at the pressmen needfully pulling sheet after
sheet, minutely examining each one to see whether it were up
to the mark; and as he left, summed up his impressions:
"We-e-11? That's all very well for Mr. Morris, but there isn't
a man here that would be worth a penny an hour to me after
he'd been here for a week ! "

New Year's Day, 1892, saw the first delivery of the "Troy"
type, and a trial-page of the Chaucer was immediately set up
in it and pulled. The letter proved to be much too large for the
purpose, and Morris at once decided to have it reduced from
Great Primer ( 1 8-point) to Pica ( 1 2-point). This third fount,
the "Chaucer," made its first appearance in the list of chapter-
headings prefixed to the Recuyell of the History es of Troye, pub-
lished on the 24th of November. It had begun to be delivered
in July, however, in which month a trial-page of the Chaucer
had been set up in it and pulled, and the form of the Chaucer as
it now is finally decided on.

The History es of Troye was the second of the five Caxton
reprints, of which two were edited by F. S. Ellis, and three by
the writer. Those edited by F. S. Ellis, the Golden Legend and.
the Order of Chivalry, in deference to the editor's tastes and
desires, were, as nearly as might be, textual and literal repro-
ductions of Caxton's editions. The three others, the Historyes
of Troye, Reynard the Foxe and Godefrey of Boloyne, were differ-
ently treated, as Morris wished them to be regarded as Kelms-
cott Press editions, and therefore to be amended where this
was desirable. Caxton's text was to be taken as a basis, but not
looked upon as archaeologically sacrosanct. It was to be col-
lated with Caxton's originals, and corrected where need was,
mistranslations being put right and omissions filled in, care
being taken to preserve the style and flavour of Caxton in doing
this. When we came to the Godefrey of Boloyne, Morris decided
that the original spelling need not be rigorously adhered to, as
Caxton was an erratic speller, following no discernible rule,
and that we were consequently free to retrench or add a letter
where the justification of a line could be improved ora "river"
avoided thereby.

Hence has arisen a legend that may as well be put an end to.
The Godefrey of Boloyne was reviewed in the Academy by a certain
German philolog, who addressed himself to the task as to one
of his Vorschungen, painstakingly counted up and enumerated
every divergence from the original text, even the most minute,
stigmatizing each and all of them as printer's errors. His
version of the facts found acceptance here and there, and I
recently came across the latest form of it in a newspaper para-
graph : " It may be of interest to mention that William Morris,

when he began his reprints at the Kelmscott Press, did not
know that a reader was required to correct the compositor's
work. After the production of one of the early Kelmscott
books, Mr. Morris found that he had allowed several misprints
to pass, and he then, upon inquiry, discovered the existence of
the printer's reader, and engaged one. It is probable that the
collation of the first book printed at the Kelmscott Press with
its original would disclose enough mistakes to entitle the work
to rank among the curiosities of literature."

In this farrago of nonsense there is hardly one word of
truth. Morris had not been an active and prolific writer for
thirty years without having "discovered the existence of the
printer's reader"; none of the Kelmscott Press books, reprint
or no, need fear comparison on the score of printer's errors
with any other books in the world. In the first days of the
Press, it is true no printer's reader in the ordinary understand-
ing of the term was employed, the place being more than sup-
plied by the competent volunteers who "read" for the Press,
taking the work seriously and priding themselves upon its due
performance, but as time went on and the work grew in vol-
ume an ordinary professional reader was employed.

Alongside of the History es of Troye, Ruskin's Nature of
Gothic, Morris's Defence of Guenevere and A Dream of John
Ball, as well as Caxton's Golden Legend, were also going
through the press, being published in the order named.

The Defence of Guenevere was finished at the beginning of
April, published on May 19th, being the first book bound in
limp vellum, which was henceforth to be the rule for all books
not issued in boards ("Half Holland"), the first book with
marginal ornaments, and the only book bearing a handwritten
title on the back, the writing being done by Herbert M. Ellis,
a son of F. S.Ellis.

So many inquiries had to be answered that a book-list was
'got out in May 1892, but as only the address of the Press
appeared on it, letters continued to reach Morris, to his annoy-
ance. On the second book-list, issued in July, my name and
address as the secretary of the Press were given. In spite of
this, letters were still addressed to Morris, and the third list,
sent out in December, carried the further intimation : "to whom
should be addressed all letters relating to books to which no

publisher's name is as yet attached." In these and some later
subsequent lists, the title and particulars of each book were
given in the type used for that book.

A woodcut titlepage, designed by Morris, and engraved by
W. H. Hooper, was prefixed to the Golden Legend; this was the
first book to be so decorated, and the second with marginal
ornaments. It was also, as has already been said, the only im-
portant Kelmscott book of which no copies were printed on
vellum. Of marginal ornaments, the Golden Legend has only
two, but the Historyes of Troye, which followed it, is richly
adorned with them, ranking third — Godefrey of Boloyne being
second — as a handsome book to the unapproachable Chaucer.
The Historyes of Troye was the first book in which the new
"Chaucer" type was used at all; the first entirely printed
therein being the Order of Chivalry.

Godefrey of Boloyne was published by and from the Kelms-
cott Press direct, without the intervention of any publisher,
as were all books thenceforward, with the exception of those
already promised to or to be commissioned by a publisher.
This course was adopted for more than one reason : it saved
bookkeeping, as books were paid for in advance, and could
be delivered to subscribers direct from the binders ; it enabled
Morris to give preference to purchasers of single copies, and
to see that an unfair share did not fall into the hands of those
who would hold them for a rise ; it also gave him exact in-
formation with regard to the real and immediate sale of each
book, and thus placed him in a position to guard against over-
printing.

A case of apparent over-printing, as it happens, did occur
with the next book but one to be issued, though Morris had
nothing to do with it. Tennyson's Maud, the first octavo with
a woodcut titlepage, and one of Morris's loveliest at that, was
finished for Macmillans in August and published by them
on September 20th. Five hundred copies were ordered and
printed, and of these the usual three hundred or thereabouts
were sold at once, but the others hung fire for a while. What
happened then is thus recounted by the Scottish Review:
"Messrs. Macmillan, who published Tennyson's Maud, were
somewhat disappointed with the sale of 500 copies, the price
to the public of which was two guineas. Hence, to their after

regret, they announced to the trade that some two hundred
copies, I think, would be sold as a remainder. On the morn-
ing after the issue of the notice, one enthusiast stationed him-
self at the firm's door at 6 a.m., there to wait patiently until
the opening hour. By noon, not a single copy, at any rate at
the remainder price, was procurable. The joke against Mr.
Macmillan will not soon be allowed to drop." It may be
added that Maud, though the only Kelmscott Press book to
be "remaindered," now stands next to Shakespeare's Poems
among the smaller books in the rarity with which it comes into
the market.

In October-November 1893 one °f the presses was re-
moved to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition at the New Gallery,
and Morris's Gothic Architecture, which had been set up-at the
Press, was printed in public, under the eyes of an interested
and constantly renewed crowd, whose presence imposed a
severe strain upon the pressman Collins's Celtic modesty.
This "moving exhibit" formed one of the salient attractions of
the Exhibition. The text of the little book had been delivered
as a lecture to the Society two years before.

Though each successive book was taken up to the end as a
new adventure, it was only for the actors that such a long suc-
cession of closely similar adventures could retain their fresh-
ness, and, now that the story of the Press has been brought up
to the point at which it was a steadily running enterprise, it
would be impossible to communicate their thrill in a recital.
To describe a succession of events, identical in outline, though
differing in detail, detail that may well appear to be incon-
sequential to all but those to whom it was once a matter of
moment, events that were enthralling to live through but are
unexciting merely to read about, would be to invite monotony.
Nor is there any need for attempting such a description, full
detail with regard to every publication of the Press being given
in Mr. Cockerell's catalogue in the appendix (pages 1 48-1 74).

Indeed, from this time on, the only outstanding date in the
history of the Press, until the appearance of the Chaucer, was
New Year's Day, 1895, wnen another house was taken at No.
2 1 Upper Mall, just across the way from No. 14, and on the
bank of the river. Here a third press was installed and kept
busy upon the Chaucer, for which work it had been specially

built, until the book had been completed. After it had been
vacated by the Press, No. 2 1 was turned into a granary, but,
much altered and partly rebuilt, is again occupied as a dwell-
ing-house.

From 1893 onwards, as A. L. Cotton said in the Contem-
porary Review, "with every issue some new development is
noticeable, some added delicacy in treatment, until, in 1896,
the culminating point was reached in the production of the
magnificent folio Chaucer, undoubtedly the noblest book as yet
achieved by any English printer." The Academy editorially
declared that the Chaucer "forms a great landmark in the his-
tory of printing, and were sufficiently monumental in itself,
had he produced no other book, to render the names of the
Kelmscott Press and William Morris memorable for all time."
And the editor of the Nineteenth Century ranked it as "the
greatest triumph of English typography."

"With its eighty-seven illustrations by Burne-Jones, each
surrounded by an ornamental border from the hand of Morris, "
wrote A. L. Cotton, "with its abundance of ornamental initial
words and letters, with its marginal decorations, its paper firm
and crisp to the touch like the paper of a Bank of England
note, its exquisite type, its careful press-work, the volume
compels admiration even from those most disposed to cavil at
the medievalism of the great designer. As a marvel of typo-
graphy, it ranks with the very finest efforts of the past In the

selection of Burne-Jones as illustrator, Morris again was for-
tunate beyond his hopes. It was a canon of his bookmaking
that the ornament, whether patternwork or illustration, must
form as much a part of the page as the type itself, and must, in
order to succeed, submit to certain limitations, and become, in
his own phrase, architectural. ... In other words, the illustra-
tions of a volume should sum up in themselves the printed
matter; they should be decorative in character, conceived with
due consideration to the nature and arrangement of the type;
and, as ornaments, they should take their place amidst the text,
not detached and unconnected as in many modern livres de
luxe, but giving, by their very position, something of distinct-
ive dignity to the typography."

If it were Morris's very great good fortune to have Burne-
Jones at hand, a lifelong friend, sympathetic, understanding, a

INITIAL WORD FOR "THE WATER OF THE WONDROUS ISLES
BY WILLIAM MORRIS

One of the last two designs made by Morris shortly before his death

THE FIRST COLOPHON

great artist, as it most undoubtedly was, for two such men
come together but seldom, and still more rarely are united for
so long or so intimately, both Morris and Burne-Jones were
fortunate in having another artist, R. Catterson-Smith, to
work with and between them. Burne-Jones was before and
above all else a painter, seeing all things, form included, in
terms of colour, and would have had to spend much time —
time which neither he nor Morris could well afford — upon
study and practice in order to be able to render that which
he saw in colour through the alien, or, at least, the unaccus-
tomed, medium of strong black line. But here it was that
Catterson-Smith could render, and rendered, inestimable help ;
he was able to appreciate exactly what Burne-Jones meant by
his drawings, and accurately to translate that which had been
conceived in terms of colour into the terms of line; to express
that meaning to perfection in the language of line, and not only
this, but to express it in the very dialect or idiom of that lan-
guage which was demanded by the purpose in view. For his
task was to translate Burne-Jones's delicate pencil drawings
into firm ink lines which were photographed on to wood-
blocks to be engraved in facsimiles that would harmonize with
and complete the page of lettering, and be undistinguishable
in character and tone from the line employed by Morris in his
type, initials, borders and ornaments. When Morris's pencil
fell from his enfeebled hand, it was Catterson-Smith who com-
pleted the designs for the grimly appropriate words "Whilom"
and "Empty"; and he also designed three borders for the
Earthly Paradise to fill places for which Morris had been
unable to provide.

Of Morris's early designs, the borders and "bloomers" in
the Glittering Plain and Poems by the Way were, most of them,
speedily discarded as being too heavy for the letter. Although
they were designed almost concurrently with his type, he had
not succeeded in reconciling them with it, not having seen it
as yet in page form. Later on, indeed, he sometimes took the
precaution, when designing a border or "weeper," of having
a page pulled on drawing-paper and working on that, being
careful to reverse the text, so as to get the effect of the typo-
graphy without having his attention distracted by the wording.
His doing this has misled some collectors, as I have seen, into

framing an example upside-down ; that is to say, taking the text
for guide, they have placed that right-side-up, thereby stand-
ing the design upon its head.

After Morris's death on October 3rd, 1896, the Kelmscott
Press was kept in being for some eighteen months by his trus-
tees, F. S. Ellis and S. C. Cockerell, with Emery Walker'sassist-
ance, in order to clear up the work already in hand and carry
through the more important undertakings that he had planned
and prepared for. Many other books than those actually
printed had been talked of by him, and would have been pro-
duced had he lived ; but these, in the absence of instructions as
to type, style, size, etc., and of the decorations to be specially
designed for them, the trustees did not feel free to proceed
with. They rightly felt that William Morris was the Kelmscott
Press; that without him it could not continue to exist; and that
their duty ended with completing work actually undertaken
or clearly outlined and fully prepared for by him.

Their last publication was a reprint of Morris's Note on his
aims in founding the Press, to which was added a Short Descrip-
tion of the Press and an Annotated List of the books printed
thereat, written by S. C. Cockerell. By kind permission of the
trustees, this has been reprinted verbatim and in extenso as an
appendix to the present volume.

VII

BOOKS PRINTED

Although the work of the Kelmscott Press must stand or fall
by the physical beauty of the books it produced, the tale of it,
and an understanding of its relation to Morris's life and thought
as a whole, would be woefully incomplete without some ap-
preciation of their contents. For, with two or three exceptions,
where friendship intervened, every Kelmscott Press book was
either a work of his own or an old favourite, long valued, whose
production in decent-seeming form was an act of love. Even
those that were commissioned by publishers — The Book of
Wisdom and Lies, Tennyson's Maud, Rossetti's Poems and
Hand and Soul — had, each of them, a personal appeal to him as
interesting and desirable for their own sake, deserving the care
with which he printed them. In the absence of a definite claim,
either intrinsic or enforced by friendship, no book would or
could have been printed by him. Above and before all else, a
book must be worth reading to be worth printing, and his
choice of books depended upon his preferences from this point
of view. If worth reading again and again, and not merely
skimmed through as a pastime or ephemeral refreshment, it
was worth all that could be done for it in the way of typography,
paper and all else, and its decoration must not be something
added to or stuck on to a readable and therefore useful thing,
but an organic outgrowth of the comeliness which was a func-
tion of its utility; something which need not be put into it for
the bare sake of usefulness, but must be put into it as an ex-
pression of pleasure in its making and an enhancement of joy
in its use. Illustrations, of course, must be determined by the
text and merely conditioned by the type and the size of the

page; but the decoration must be determined by the typo-
graphy, and be conditioned only by the limitations of space and
oftaste.

In an apologetic aside, Morris once pleaded that it was "only
natural" that he, being "a decorator by profession," should
attempt to ornament a book suitably. Although philistines
have attacked him from time to time for doing so as richly as he
did, there can be but few remaining by now, even among philis-
tines, who do not realize how great is the gift he has left us in
the good measure and running over of decorative design with
which the Kelmscott Press books are enriched. Until the acci-
dents of time and life have once more united such a team as was
found in Morris and Burne-Jones, with Catterson-Smith and
Hooper to aid them, we are unlikely to be lucky enough to fall
in again for so rich a heritage of enduring beauty.

That he had felt his own books to be worth writing would
quite naturally suggest that he should think them worth print-
ing, even if they had not already been accepted and acclaimed
as they deserved. Yet it was not of them he thought first. As
we have seen, it was no more than a hazard which made him
begin with a book of his own, because it came handy, or go on
to a second, because the matter for it was in existence, and
there was a demand that this material be assembled into per-
manent form. Had it not been for the oversight which resulted
in the delivery of a wrong size of paper, the first book would
have been produced in honour of the first English printer,
though rather in his capacity of story-teller than in his capacity
as printer. It was the wealth of stories in the Golden Legend
that formed its attraction for Morris. As it was, his own books
are in a minority, and it was not upon them that he bestowed
his most loving care or most fertile invention. It is but fitting,
however, that his own books be given precedence here, and as
he began with poetry, so may we.

"In the poetry of Morris," said the Daily Chronicle at the
time of his death, "all his passion for imperfect Utopias past,
and perfect Utopias to come, all his hatred of monstrous
modernity, all his sense of life as a thing capable of being
and meant to be radiant, joyous, unoppressed, found their true
form. The Defence of Guenevere, the Life and Death of Jason,
the Earthly Paradise, the Story of Sigurd, Love is Enough, Poems

by the Way, with translations of the Odyssey and Aeneid — what
worship of beauty is in these! Beauty in a very wide and full
sense, including beauty of battle and storm, of action and pas-
sion, not less than of things peaceful and at rest, things comely
and calm. Beginning with a mystical and remote world of en-
chantment, he became gradually more and more enamoured
of a fresh and simple world, romantic indeed, but conceivable ;
and he ended with songs for Socialists, practical march music
for the Israelites in exitu de Aegypto. From a personal passion
for beauty, he came to hunger for its universal empire among
men, beauty of work and pleasure, beauty for the common
weal. Rossetti, cloistral and eclectic, never dreamed phanta-
sies more piercing in their strangeness and haunting in their
visionariness than some poems in the Defence of Guenevere.
. . . Here we are in the very heart of Avalon or Broceliande,
or some country stranger still and more fearful in its mystery.
Other poems, with a note of Froissart and the Chronicles in
them, songs of war and fierceness and wild glad life, prepare
us for the more spirited parts of Jason and the Earthly Paradise,
but even these two works are medieval in their processional
pageantry and languorousness, whilst their greater art, their
improved mastery in craftsmanship, make them less startling
than the unearthly earlier volume. Still, full of the sea and the
air and the green fields, they take us away from the mysterious
atmosphere of the first poems, and the vehement Saga spirit of
Sigurd does not come as a surprise. The Norse and Icelandic
sweep and surge of passion, high-hearted and true, woke all
the scald in him, the impassioned chaunting rhapsodist, sud-
denly aflame with inspiration."

His translations of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, not having
been reprinted at the Kelmscott Press, do not come into the
story, but all his original poems were and do; these are named
above in the order of their first appearance, and in that order
will be treated here.

The Defence of Guenevere was published in 1858, when
Morris was twenty-four, and a little over two years after he left
Oxford, where many of the poems had been written. Few of
his earliest poems found a place in it, however, as most of these
had been destroyed. Acting by instinct upon what afterwards
became a reasoned conclusion — that a work of art must pro-

ceed from one continued action of the mind, and if it does not
"come right" at once must not be "pulled right" but thrown
aside — a poem with which he was dissatisfied was torn up
or burnt. The few that exist, including the first he wrote,
"TheWillowandtheRed Cliff, "now printed in the Collected
Edition of his works, were preserved by his poet-friend,
Canon Dixon, who kept copies of them. Those that he pub-
lished in the Defence of Guenevere fall, roughly, into two cate-
gories : poems inspired by the reading of Malory, and poems
inspired by the reading of Froissart.

Under the spell of these two wizards, Malory and Froissart,
the young poet had fallen, and under it he remained to a greater
or less extent until the end of his life; though the influence of
Malory waned somewhat as the youthful dreamer grew up to
be the mature man of action, Froissart's chronicle of brave
deeds and stirring events lost none of its enduring charm.
Morris did not merely read but live both Malory and Froissart,
and these early poems are those of a young, sensitive and
creative mind, endowed with an extraordinary power of seeing
the characters of a story, not as pictured figures upon a fanciful
background, but as flesh and blood, men and women who
breathe and move and act amid their natural surroundings —
surroundings that are more often remembered than imagined ;
for the forests of Epping and Savernake, the cities of Rouen
and Oxford, Beauvais, Bruges, Amiens, Chartres, as he saw
them first and as no man will ever see them again, the little
towns and villages and farms, the roads and rivers, of rural
France and England, were already his at call. Nor did he
merely see these men and women in their surroundings; he
lived among them as one of themselves, feeling their emotions
as though they were his own, every detail of temperament, cos-
tume, scenery, vividly realized, and struck in with an assured
and sympathetic hand.

As he instinctively acted upon the principle that a work of
art must proceed from one uninterrupted action of the mind,
so with equal certainty and Tightness did he address his verse
to the ear, relating an episode, as later on he was to tell many a
story, directly and simply, without rhetorical or dramatic arti-
fice or "literary" embellishment, rather as a recitative than as a
recitation. That this return to nature embarrassed the critics

of 1 8 58 is hardly to be wondered at, seeing that it continues to
disconcert the critics of to-day. Dr. Richard Garnett, himself
a poet, writing in the Literary Gazette^ was the only accepted
critic of the time to hail the newcomer at his value and at once.
John Skelton ("Shirley") followed suit in i860, incidentally
pointing out what still needs to be reaffirmed, that the un-
familiar words used here and there by Morris are "not mere
fantasy ; that the employment of antique and formal words and
habits is not formal or antiquarian only, but denotes a living
insight into the thought and heart of the dead people whose life
they shaped."

Of the effect of the poems upon Morris's contemporaries
we may judge by two instances. Andrew Lang said, years
later : "I and several of my contemporaries at college knew the
Defence of Guenevere almost by heart, before the name of Mr.
Morris was renowned, and before he had published the Life
and Death of Jason. We found in the earlier book something
which no other contemporary poet possessed in the same mea-
sure : an extraordinary power in the realm of fantasy ; an un-
rivalled sense of what was most exquisite and rare in the life of
the Middle Ages. We found Froissart's people alive again in
Mr. Morris's poems, and we knew better what thoughts and
emotions lay in the secret of their hearts than we could learn
from the bright superficial pages of Froissart." Val Prinsep
has described a dinner in Oxford with Rossetti, at which
Morris was present, afterwards being pressed by Rossetti to
read some of his poems : "the effect produced on my mind was
so strong that to this day, forty years after, I can still recall the
scene. Rossetti on the sofa, with large melancholy eyes fixed
on Morris, the poet at the table reading and ever fidgeting
with his watch-chain, and Burne-Jones working at a pen-and-
ink drawing. ... I confess I returned to the Mitre with my
brain in a whirl."

Morris continued to write, and write in verse, because he
could not help it, but for nine years he published nothing in
volume form. Painting with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, archi-
tecture with Street and Philip Webb, modelling and carv-
ing by himself, the foundation and management of Morris,
Faulkner, Marshall & Co., with all the decorative crafts to be
mastered, account for his apparent inactivity. By 1 866, as we

know, the Earthly Paradise was "in the air," and among the
stories planned for it was one to be called "The Deeds of Jason."
This grew upon his hands — mainly, I think, because of his
deepening interest in Medea, who fills the role of heroine much
more notably than does Jason that of hero — until he decided
to let it stand alone as the Life and Death of Jason. On its
appearance in 1 867 it was an immediate and undisputed suc-
cess, though here and there a reservation was made which reads
funnily nowadays. Thus, the Athenaeum interrupts a cordial
welcome of the poem to remark that it "has nothing in common
with the hopes, the interests and the sympathies of modern
life; for all that appears in this poem, the creed of Christen-
dom might never have been professed." And this was not the
severest rebuke addressed to the poet for failing to foist 1 9th
century morality upon a prehistoric Greek story, for one re-
viewer bitterly complained that an English poet should have
represented a princess as visiting a single gentleman in his
bedroom!

Joseph Knight in the Literary Gazette, an anonymous critic
in the Spectator, another in the Times, and Swinburne in the
Fortnightly, were unqualified in their praise. The Spectator
underlines the originality of Morris's Medea, no longer the
legendary sorceress and little more, but a woman great in her
love and letting all else go for love, and sums up the poem as
"a delightful mixture of the old and the new, of Hellenic tradi-
tion exercising its peculiar spell over an Anglo-Saxon mind."
Swinburne writes: "Here is a poem sown of itself. Sprung
from no alien seed, cut after no alien model; fresh as wind,
bright as light ; full of the spring and the sun. . . . Rarely but in
the ballad and romance periods has such poetry been written,
so broad and sad and simple, so full of deep and direct fire,
certain of its aim, without blemish, without fault; . . . the verse
... is as the garment of Medea, steeped in strange moisture as
of tears and liquid flame, to be kindled by the sun." Charles
Eliot Norton in the Nation, and Henry James in the North
American Review, as part of their praise of the poem, also com-
mented upon the importance given to Medea, and the power
with which her character had been rendered. Ruskin, in his
Queen of the Air, said that we "may obtain a more truthful idea
of the nature of Greek religion and legend from the poems of

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ITALIAN HUMANISTIC CALLIGRAPHY, I 5TH CENTURY

Keats, and the nearly as beautiful, and, in general grasp of sub-
ject, far more powerful, recent work of Morris, than from frigid
scholarship, however extensive. Not that the poet's impres-
sions or renderings of things are wholly true, but their truth
is vital, not formal."

In the Earthly Paradise, of which the first volume was pub-
lished in April 1868, and the fourth in December 1870, are
gathered up a winnowed selection of Morris's most favourite
stories, taken at will from the literature of half the world. Their
ultimate sources have been laboriously identified by Dr. Julius
Riegel in his Die Quellen von William Morris's Dichtung "The
Earthly Paradise" a book which not only pleased and amused
Morris but "taught him a great deal about his stories that he
had not known before." As a matter of fact, his method then,
as throughout his life, was to read widely for his own interest
and amusement — with such catholicity of taste that I have seen
him read the Gesta Romanorum and Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq
with what appeared to be an equal absorption — and if a story
appealed to him as re-tellable, to re-read it, either at once or
later on, lay the book aside, and allow the tale to grow as it
would in his own mind. So that, in identifying their quellen,
Dr. Riegel has by no means always identified the place or shape
in which Morris found them. Some of them, and not the least
beautiful, may even have grown from a bald paragraph in Lem-
priere, just as, years later, A Kings Lesson sprang and flowered
into poignancy and charm from a chance-met "fill-up" at the
foot of a column in Dickens's Household Words.

Neither in the Earthly Paradise nor ever, as the Edinburgh
Review (1897) pointed out, did Morris attempt to produce
"literature," "he wanted to tell a story effectively, to throw a
new light on a situation (as he certainly does in the Defence of
Guenevere\ to realize some of the actualities of medieval life,
and to present a vivid picture to the eye, by descriptive epithets
in regard to colour and detail which are brought in so naturally
that they seem not so much inventions as descriptions of what
the writer had actually seen This Homeric gift of visual-
izing a scene, and seizing on all its details, is obvious through

all Morris's poetry All the details of the scene are gone

through with touch after touch, till we seem to be drawn into
it, and forget the modern world entirely."

97 h

With this book, Morris finally and quite definitely ranked
himself among the foremost poets of his age. Two such very
different and far distant men as John Morley and John Green-
leaf Whittier thus hailed him ; Whittier declaring the poem to
be one of the greatest of the century, and Morley that it might
easily outlive Tennyson or Browning. Indeed, so universal,
definitive and permanent was and is the admiration it evoked,
that Morris has been labelled for all time — to the detriment of
his later, and in many respects far stronger, work — as "the
Author of the Earthly Paradise."

Two or three points on which it and he have been misun-
derstood, however, call for notice. First, the shadow of death
which has been said to hang over it, and the brooding dreami-
ness which has been held to pervade it. Just as 1 9th-century
manners and moralities were inevitably "out of the picture"
when the poet was dealing with Jason and Medea, so here —
when it is remembered that the Wanderers, the central figures
of the story, are fleeing from the Black Death, and have been
disillusioned by their long ill-success in finding that paradise
upon earth of which they are in search — the hatred and fear of
death, a sense of the unreality, impermanence and uncertainty
of life are with equal inevitability "in the picture." Then, this
needful or even compulsory element of the theme, and its treat-
ment by the poet, has too often been transferred to the poet
himself, and a personal fear of death attributed to him. That
Morris had the strong man's dislike for death as an idea is true ;
what was repugnant in the idea was not death in itself, how-
ever, but the cessation of creative activity that it implied ; the
cutting short of that patterned web of work and love, repeat-
ing always, with essential unity underlying its ever-varying
detail, that was his ideal of life. There was no cowardice in his
attitude, but that which interrupted the pattern, disarranged
its continuity, or derogated from its beauty, he regarded as a
catastrophe; and the death of Dickens, for whom his love and
admiration were unbounded, in the midst of an unfinished and
unfinishable work, haunted his memory for the rest of his days
as a heart-shaking tragedy. That the pattern of life should not
merely be cut short but torn across, as it were, leaving its end
ragged and its intent frustrated, was more than his mind could
face with tranquillity.

Again, his over-quoted envoy is to be considered in relation
to the conditions under which he wrote, and the difficulties
with which he was contending as a designer and maker of
beautiful things. In and through his decorative work, he was
being increasingly faced by the dishonesties which hampered,
and the lack of competence in others which impeded, the real-
ization of his desires. And he was being forced, sorely against
the grain, to recognize that sooner or later he would be driven
into neglecting or interrupting his chosen task, to descend into
the arena and give battle to the forces of error and of wrong.
To sing of cleaner and simpler times in materialistic days, when
most ears were attuned to the chink of money and to little else,
was "idle," a vain waste of effort, and the days of old were
"empty" to a generation which despised all pre-mechanistic,
pre-scientific existence. And his protest that he was not "born
to set the crooked straight" was wrung from him by the pre-
monition that within the next few years, at the expense of his
personal health and comfort and the interruption of his work,
he would be giving up a great part of his time and energy to
doing that very thing. Indeed, his first lecture, in 1877, shows
that he had thought much and been deeply preoccupied for a
long while with regard to social questions.

Love is Enough (1872)13 the most frequently mentioned of
all his works, next to the Earthly Paradise, yet, paradoxically
enough, appears to be one of the least known. Rossetti thought
the "sort of masque" was "a very fine work," and "at a higher
point of execution perhaps than anything he has done — having
a passionate lyric quality such as one found in his earliest
work, and of course much more mature balance in carrying
out." A "sort of masque" or mystery play it is, conceived as
passing upon five receding planes of action, of which the first
is that of the physical world, while the others are more and
more dimly seen through the mists of reality, until upon
the furthest the pure passion of love is impersonal and has
lost all touch with the flesh. For once, Morris revealed
that mystical side of his complex nature that he usually
kept well hidden. Of all his poems, this is the most haunt-
ingly melodious; the reader who can read it aloud — crooning
rather than declaiming it — and can remain unmoved, or fail
to be haunted for the rest of his days by its flowing harmony

and subtle rhythm, maywrite himself down as an irredeemable
philistine.

Morris, as I knew him in later years, did not care to talk
about Love is Enough, and it was obviously not among those of
his works he liked most, probably because of the self-revela-
tion to which I have alluded. On one occasion, talking about
the deeper things with J. H. Middleton and others, he electri-
fied those present by snatching down the volume from his
bookshelves, rapping upon it with a paper-knife, pointing to
its title, and exclaiming : "There's a lie for you, though 'twas I
that told it! Love isn't enough in itself; love and work, yes!
Work and love, that's the life of a man! Why, a fellow can't
even love decently unless he's got work to do, and pulls his
weight in the boat ! "

While the Earthly Paradise was on the stocks, Morris took
up the study of Icelandic with Eirikr Magnusson, thus com-
ing into personal contact with northern stories and myths in
their native tongue, and naturalizing himself into a strange,
unspoilt and very wonderful world of heroic thought and
action, which he had hitherto known only at second hand or
as a casual visitor. The life and literature of the North had
always attracted him strongly, as may be seen from the north-
ern elements in the Earthly Paradise, but now that he could
enter freely into the northern mind through its purest and most
characteristic expression, untainted with any tinge of moder-
nity, he felt, as he said of his visit to Iceland itself: "It was no
idle whim that drew me there, but a true instinct for what I
needed." And to the Volsunga Saga he was especially drawn,
regarding it as the finest story in the world, not so much be-
cause of its restrained but high-wrought emotional strength,
or its terse telling, or its romantic remoteness, as because it
seemed to him to focus and confront all the dominant passions
and forces of life. Manhood of the most noble type, and god-
hood made after its own image, at grips with ineluctable doom,
taking all things heroically and as they come, without that
hysterical unmanliness which had always irked him even in his
best-loved Greeks, or that unimaginative efficiency which had
offended him in the Romans, wrought upon him and stirred
him to the depths of his being, finding embodiment at length
in the one true sustained epic in English, written with supreme

ioo

Tightness in a metre and a style that are characteristically Eng-
lish, owing nothing to foreign or classical influences. The
metre is intrinsically that of our native ballads and folk-songs,
enriched with a deeper note and a more potent swing; in
Morris's hands it is infinitely flexible, giving direct and pas-
sionate expression to the woe-torn womanhood of Brynhild,
the fate-laden hatred of Fafnir, or the godlike wrath and
sorrow of Odin, held as helpless as are mortals by an all-ruling
fate. And the style is limpid, simple, strong, having a cumu-
lative power that is rare in modern English, growing its own
beauties as it goes, unspoilt by any recourse to rhetoric, un-
veneered with any verbal marqueterie. Sigurd the Volsung
(i 877) is out and away the greatest, as it is the last, of Morris's
longer poems, and that by which he himself would rather be
remembered.

Poems by the Way (1 891) is a collection of Morris's short
and fugitive poems, most of which had appeared in the Fort-
nightly^ Time, Athenaeum, English Illustrated, Academy, and
other periodicals, including the Commonweal, and ranging in
date from 1868 to 1889. One poem, "Goldilocks and Goldi-
locks," was written by request, in order to "bump out" the
volume to its required length. Had it not been for C. Fairfax
Murray, who had preserved some early unpublished poems
and kept a record of others that had been printed, it would
have been almost impossible to get the volume together; for,
as has been said already, Morris was unhelpful in this respect.
Even as it was, though other friends contributed their aid,
several poems remained uncollected — e.g. two sonnets pub-
lished in the Atlantic Monthly in 1 870 — and it is quite possible
that others will still be discovered. As might be expected,
there is little or no unity of method or of mood in a collection of
poems written at such widely separated times and under such
varying conditions, and ranging over so many spheres of
thought and interest. Among them are some — "The Message
of the March Wind," for example — which must be classed
with his finest lyric masterpieces; while, of the volume as a
whole, the Athenaeum said : "In all that is noble in temper and
beautiful in art, this volume could hardly be surpassed by the
author of Sigurd. ... In Mr. Morris's case, the high poetic
temper does not wane, but, on the contrary, waxes with

101

years ; its expression is mellower now." And the Academy was
almost as emphatic in its praise.

In all his later work, with one partial exception — the House
of the Wolfings^ which, it will be recalled, was "written in prose
and in verse" — Morris turned to prose for the expression of
his "high poetic temper;" and his telling of tales — "I must
have a story to write now as long as I live," said he — took the
form of those prose romances which would ensure his im-
mortality had he nothing else to his name. As a youth at Ox-
ford, he had tried his hand upon prose fiction ; in the Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine was published, amongst others, a
short story of contemporary life, with a cold, proud, high-
nosed heroine, named Mabel. But prose was not then his
natural medium, and the laboured stiffness of his writing be-
trays the effort it cost him. Several years later, he essayed a
novel upon orthodox lines, but speedily dropped it as an un-
congenial task; he could not accept the conventions, or move
with freedom amid the restrictions, of modern society; and he
found that the story was turning out to be, as he avowed,
"nothing but landscape and sentiment."

His intense work upon the translation of the Icelandic
sagas, however, and the many lectures he wrote for delivery
before varying audiences upon subjects about which he felt
keenly, unconsciously trained him as a prosewriter, giving
him the facility of expression in prose that hitherto he had
found only in verse. His wide reading, and how wide that
was has been seen, gave him a vocabulary which ranged over
the thousand-year wealth of English words; his practice in
rendering the laconic and compact style of the sagas into
closely equivalent English had confirmed his affection for,
and strengthened his command over, the curt and pithy
words which are native to our tongue, but which had gone
out of fashion and been supplanted by imported longtailed
synonyms. His laborious and oft-repeated endeavours to
reach the minds of unprepared hearers, to force them to
understand and, if possible, to accept his ideas upon art as an
indispensable component of life, had increased the power dis-
played by him in his poems from the very beginning, that of
telling a story with a clear directness which gives it a reality
that realism toils in vain to achieve. Call his romances day-

I02

dreams, as has been done, and it must be admitted that, if they
are day-dreams, they are only so to the extent to which all good
stories must be ; stories, that is, which are told and heard as an
escape from the commonplaces, and a redressing of the in-
justices, of everyday life ; a recoil from the elaborate cowardices
and mean cruelties of contemporary civilization, an outcome
of the writer's homesickness for a stronger, simpler, more fully
human life than that of his day and time: the homesickness
wistfully described in the titlepage poem for the House of the
Wolfings :

Whiles in the early winter eve

We pass amid the gathering night

Some homestead that we had to leave

Years past : and see its candles bright

Shine in the room beside the door

Where we were merry years agone

But now must never enter more,

As still the dark road drives us on.

E'en so the world of man may turn

At even of some hurried day

And see the ancient glimmer burn

Across the waste that hath no way ;

Then with the faint light in its eyes

A while I bid it linger near

And nurse in wavering memories

The bitter-sweet of days that were.
At the least and worst, it must be said of him that, if he
dreamed of remote action in an unreal world, he acted out his
dreams fiercely and effectively in the real one.

It was, as always, a need of the moment that brought him to
the practice of a new craft. A serial story, to steady the circula-
tion of the Commonweal, was badly needed, and Morris asked
one of his helpers to write one, suggesting Wat Tyler's re-
bellion as a fitting theme. Puzzled and offended by a refusal
on the ground of a lack of the epic faculty, he thundered out:
"Epic faculty be hanged for a yarn ! Confound it, man, you've
only got to tell a storyV Whether his vexation acted as a stimu-
lus or no, the idea remained but a very few days in the "back-
shop" before he turned up at the Commonweal office, one
Wednesday morning, with a first instalment which was at once

103

rushed into type. The rest of the story was written from week
to week (i 886—1 8 8 7) as required, in moments of respite from
other and more pressing work. That it had much influence
upon the circulation of the paper cannot be said, but its recep-
tion in volume form was enthusiastic, and it still continues to
pass through edition after edition. In spite, or because, of its
propagandist motive, its necessary contact and contrast be-
tween the world of to-day and that in which its action passes,
no other of Morris's tales invests its dream-scene with such
home-like verisimilitude. And the speech made by John Ball
at the village cross is not only an outspoken proclamation of
Morris's personal creed but one of the finest pieces of English
prose that have ever been written.

News from Nowhere, though taken here out of its due order
of date, for it was written alongside of the Roots of the Mountains,
is rightly to be considered next, as it was the second and last of
the propagandist romances, having been written as John Ball
was, in weekly instalments for publication in the Commonweal.
In essence an Utopia, in origin it was a counterblast to the
Looking Backward of Edward Bellamy, which Morris regarded
as being far nearer to a damning indictment than to an attract-
ive presentment of Socialism. It was made a vehicle as he
went along for his reflections upon things present as well as
upon things future, and in general scheme is a journey through
the friendly and familiar scenes of his daily life, seen as he
would have them and peopled by men and women as he desired
they should be. The journey ends most fittingly and prophet-
ically at Kelmscott, "the type of the pleasant places of the
earth," where he is now sleeping his last sleep.

Next after John Ball came the House of the Woljings{\% 8 8)
and the Roots of the Mountains (1889), which have been dealt
with already, and would be out of place here had they not, as
they were not reprinted at the Kelmscott Press. The Glitter-
ing Plain followed, and of this the Saturday Review said that its
"manner of telling is to us at least quite charming, and we pity
the person who is so disconcerted by a few mannerisms as not
to be able to taste it. The interest is kept up from the first to
the last page, the characters are sufficient and happily con-
trasted, and there is by a long way more real knowledge of
human nature than in the elaborate fretwork of modernity

104

che le donne zouerie no deueno mai
guardar in faza al fuo cofeffor elquale
die elTer uechio de bona fama e de bo/
na rehgione e de bona obferuantia cu
loquale non fe die prender algunafa'
miiianta faluo qto fe cofefa foiamete
tre uolte a lano zoe da pafqua granda
da pafqua de mazo e da nadal faluo
pffirmitadcoueridulgetiaoueramete
per qualche exceffiuo cafo,

TYPE OF NICHOLAS JENSON : "GLORIA MULIERUM," VENICE [H7l]

Qjiefto penfiero acora none dacemerepchenon puo nufcire
cipalmentelegenti tedefche mandate dalRe Mafredi(nellequ
enimici finfidano)tre mefi foil hanno areftare mthofcana &
po come e diuulgato per tucto congrandc fatica gliufciti dali
di poterono obtenere:& enne gia confumato lameta inanzi •
minciato loafTedio:& laltre genti quado quefte fipartiranno
fmo noui refterebbono urcure:& ecd aggiunto eluerno che pre
foprauiene che fuole impedire 6C ropere ogni obfidione^Potc
aqueflo propofito perle caftella uicine altemtono denimici 1
uoftre genci accioche eglino habbino cagione dipenfare non
guardare Iecofe lorotche offendere quelle daltri:& nondubic,
che perquefto timore o eglino noandrano aporre loafTedio a
legaci come eglf difegnano oueramete fe loporrano prefto fa
ftredti come fifentirano offefi ntrarrc legenti alia deuotione
zadubio eno e uia alcuna che fia piu ficura nenmedio piu ce
fin confederati chequefto:pero che fe uoi conducerete eluofl
to fquegli luoghi molto picolofi:& loro cheandranno & uoi
tretecorrere*Ecipaf effere certi fecodo lecomecfture & fegni cl
giamo che enimici no potrebbono hauere maggiof defidenc

TYPE OF JACQUES LE ROUGE! ARETINO, LIONARDO ; " HISTORIA DEL
POPOLO FIORENTINO," FLORENCE, I476

which it is the fashion to admire. What matter that there is
much fighting, much love-making, and not a little sheer eat-
ing and drinking? To fight heartily and to love heartily, not
neglecting at proper (and frequent) times the equal banquet,
how good is it! For these things are among temporal things
in a way eternal, and the other things among temporal things
are so plus-quam-temporal !"

Next in order of publication, but not strictly so in order of
writing, for the writing of the Well at the World 's End was
begun before and went on side by side with it, was the Wood
beyond the World. This was taken by some of the reviewers as
an allegory, perhaps because they had John Ball and News
from Nowhere in their minds, could not yet imagine Morris
as other than propagandist, and with a little "make-believe"
might very well read a "lesson" into the story. Morris at once
repudiated any such interpretation, saying in a letter to the
Spectator: "I had not the least intention of thrusting an alle-
gory into the Wood beyond the World \ it is meant for a tale pure
and simple, with nothing didactic about it. If I have to write
or speak on social problems, I always try to be as direct as I
possibly can be. On the other hand, I should consider it bad
art in any one writing an allegory not to make it clear from the
first that this was his intention, and not to take care throughout
that the allegory and the story should interpenetrate, as does
the great master of allegory, Bunyan."

The Athenaeum, not one of those which fell into this error,
said: "It is an extremely interesting fact that Mr. Morris, in
exercising his rare poetical gift, has so often of late turned from
metrical to unmetrical forms. Though his romances must
needs be taken as being in some measure the outcome of his
studies in Saga literature, they hold, in conception no less than
in execution, a place of their own. If the name of metreless
poem can properly be given to any form of imaginative litera-
ture, these romances are more fully entitled to the name than
anything that has gone before. . . . This last exquisite story of
his must be held to surpass the best of its predecessors in
poetical feeling and poetical colour, and to equal them in
poetical substance. Here, more abundantly than ever, we get
that marvellously youthful way of confronting the universe
which is the special feature of Mr. Morris's genius. It is not

105

easy to realize that it is other than a poet in the heyday of his
glorious youth who tells with such gusto this wonderful story.
... By the side of this exhaustless creator of youthful and
lovely things, the youngest of the poets who have just appeared
above the horizon seems faded and jaded."

Like several others of his tales, Child Christopher (1895)
was first conceived in verse, and a beginning made, but the
manuscript went astray. It was again begun in verse, but after
a very few lines had been written Morris threw the fragment
aside, being about to light his pipe with it when it was rescued,
and started again in prose. As it stands, it exemplifies his
method of making an old story his own: "Read it through,
then shut the book and write it out again as a new story for
yourself." A man might take what he liked from another, said
he, provided that he made it his own. Taking the theme and
outline of the ancient Lay of Have/ok the Dane, he transmuted
and re-created the characters and incidents, investing them
with an altogether new atmosphere and feeling.

Published in 1896, the Well at the World's End had been
begun so far back as 1 892, and in the interval had progressed
by fits and starts, separated by long stretches of other work, so
slowly that Morris nicknamed it "The Interminable." No
sign of haste or interruption mars it, however, and it stands out
as the crowning prose masterpiece of his creative life. Near to
it stands the Roots of the Mountains, but nothing can rival it.

Swinburne declared in the Nineteenth Century that "the
creative gift of Mr. Morris, his distinctive gift of imagination,
cannot be defined or appreciated by any such test of critical com-
parison as is applicable to the work of any other man. He is
himself alone, and so absolutely that his work can no more be
likened to any medieval than to any contemporary kinsman's.
. . . Readers and lovers (the terms should here be synonymous)
of his former tales and poems in prose will expect to find in this
masterpiece — foraperfectanduniquemasterpieceitis — some-
thing that will remind them less of Child Christopher than of
the Wood beyond the World: the mere likeness in the titles would
suggest so much : and this I think they will not fail to find : but
I am yet more certain that the quality of this work is even finer
and stronger than that of either. The interest, for those who
bring with them to the reading of a work of imagination any

106

auxiliary or sympathetic imagination of their own, is deeper
and more vivid as well as more various : but the crowning test
and triumph of the author's genius will be recognized in the all
but unique power of touching with natural pathos the alien
element of magical or supernatural fiction. . . . The perfect
simplicity and the supreme nobility of the spirit which in-
forms and pervades and quickens and exalts [this magically
beautiful tale] must needs make any but an inept and incapable
reader feel yet once more a sense of wonder at the generation
which could imagine a difference and a contrast between simple
and noble. The simplest English writer of our time is also the
noblest ; and the noblest by reason and by virtue of his sublime
simplicity of spirit and of speech. If the English of the future
are not utterly unworthy and irredeemably unmindful of the
past, they will need no memorial to remind them that his name
was William Morris."

A writer as widely removed from Swinburne by tempera-
ment and by training as are the Poles in space, H. G. Wells,
had this to say in the Saturday Review : "It is Malory, enriched
and chastened by the thought and learning of six centuries, this
story of Ralph and his Quest of the Well at the World's End.
It is Malory, with the glow of the dawn of the Twentieth Cen-
tury warming his tapestries and beaten metal. It is Malory,
but instead of the mystic Grail, the search for long life and the
beauty of strength. . . . The book is to be read, not simply for
pleasure. To those who write, its pages will be a purification ;

it is full of clean strong sentences and sweet old words And

all the workmanship of the book is stout oaken stuff that must
needs endure, and preserve the memory of one of the stoutest,
cleanest lives that has been lived in these latter days."

The Water of the Wondrous Isles, written in 1895, published
in 1897, and the Sundering Flood, written in 1896, published
in 1898, are magnificent stories, in all ways up to the level of
their predecessors, excepting the Roots of the Mountains and the
Well at the World's End, but were and still are overshadowed
by the last named, to the level of which not even Morris him-
self could attain more than once in a lifetime. And the Sunder-
ingFloodalso suffers from the fact that it was necessarily printed
from an uncorrected manuscript, and without the author's
supervision. Indeed, the pen dropped from his hand before

107

the manuscript was complete, and the last few pages had to be
written down from his dictation.

Gothic Architecture, his only prose work to be printed at the
Kelmscott Press which was not a story, original or translated,
was one of Morris's lectures, delivered before the Arts and
Crafts Society in 1889, printed in response to a wide appeal for
a book of his printing that could be bought at a low price.

Of his translations, Beowulf 'is in verse, and at the best but
a qualified success, being an attempt at a wholly unrealizable
achievement. The original text is not only mutilated and in-
complete, but what is left of it is corrupt. Even if it were com-
plete and uncorrupted, the tongue in which it is written is more
archaic than that of any other fragment remaining to us in any
of the languages that are ancestral to English, while the allu-
sions are more clueless and the incidents and atmosphere more
foreign to the modern mind than those of the Elder Edda. To
Morris the story, or what remains of it, was intelligible and
interesting, but not even he could render it in terms that are
intelligible to any but a highly trained reader.

Nearer to our own time, and translated into a prose that
delightfully preserves the savour of the old French in which
they were first written, are the four stories — KingFlorus, Amis
andAmile, Emperor Coustans and Over Sea — taken from a little
volume, Nouvelles Francoises en prose du Xlllesiecle, published
at Paris by Jannet in 1856, which from its first appearance had
been a familiar friend and a source of inspiration. From the
story of the Emperor Coustans grew that of "The Man born
to be King," one of the poems included in the Earthly Paradise.
From that of Amys and Amile came another poem, "Amys and
Amillion," written for inclusion in the Earthly Paradise but
finally rejected. Published along with its original, VOrdene de
Chevalerie, as the second part of the Order of Chivalry, is "The
Ordination of Knighthood," a translation into short couplets
of a French poem of the 13th century, which may or may not
have inspired the prose treatise translated by Caxton.

Of the original works by English authors, ranging in date
from Chaucer to Swinburne, which Morris reprinted at the
Kelmscott Press, nothing more need be said, excepting for two
of them, than that they illustrate and justify the catholicity of
his taste. The exceptions are: the chapter on the Nature of

108

Gothic, reprinted from The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin;
and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Read before the end of his first year at Oxford, Ruskin gave
him the lead he needed towards co-ordinating and understand-
ing the philosophy — philosophy, that is, as a method of life,
and not in the current sense as a systematization of abstract
notions, which have lost all contact with experience — the philo-
sophy which underlay his instinctive acceptance of Gothic and
fierce rejection of Renaissance architecture; a reason for his
likes and enmities in art, a reason which became increasingly
reasonable, valid and conclusive, as his historical knowledge
and practical working experience deepened and widened.
When he spoke of Ruskin as his Master, as he sometimes did
— just as, in other moods or at other moments, he would speak
of Carlyle, or Keats, or Chaucer, in the same way — it meant
no more than this, that Ruskin had greatly aided him in clari-
fying and developing his youthful ideas, and had helped him
along the road he must have travelled in any case. He never
forgot for an instant the debt he owed Ruskin for doing this,
and the very first book undertaken after he had gained confi-
dence in the resources of the Press was Ruskin's Nature of Gothic.

Chaucer he had known and loved as a schoolboy, and
Chaucer had been more than a Master to him before he had
even heard of Ruskin. Chaucer was a friend who reached out
a hand to him across the centuries, leading him through the
scenes and introducing him to the folk of that uncommercial-
ized England he so dearly loved and so deeply regretted. And
the Kelmscott Chaucer was to him far more of a monument,
erected in reverent affection, and in recognition of a life-long
debt, than a personal achievement in book-printing.

Caxton's translations had a twofold attraction for him : first
and foremost as interesting story-books, and secondly as ex-
amples of strong and living, though rather formless, English ;
modern English in the making. The Golden Legend is also a
storehouse of medieval tradition and religious thought, as
well as of much folk-lore and many varied marvels. Of the
Recuyell of the History es of Troye he wrote: "It makes a thor-
oughly amusing story, instinct with medieval thought and
manners. For, though written at the end of the Middle Ages
and dealing with classical mythology, it has in it no token of

109

the coming Renaissance, but is purely medieval. It is the last
issue of that story of Troy which through the whole of the
Middle Ages had such a hold on men's imaginations ; the story
built up from a rumour of the Cyclic Poets, of the heroic city
of Troy, defended by Priam and his gallant sons, led by Hector
the Preux Chevalier, and beset by the violent and brutal Greeks,
who were looked on as the necessary machinery for bringing
about the undeniable tragedy of the fall of the city. Surely this
is well worth reading, if only as a piece of undiluted medieval-
ism." Reynard the Foxe he declared to be one of the very best of
Caxton's works as to style, "and being translated from a kin-
dred tongue [the Dutch] is delightful as mere language. In its
rude joviality, and simple and direct delineation of character,
it is a thoroughly good representative of the famous ancient
Beast Epic." Godefrey of Boloyne is not only interesting in it-
self, but is doubly so as a record of one of those earth-shaking
events, the Crusades, and of the carving out of the shortlived
Latin kingdoms in the East. It has a further value, in that it
shows what medieval chivalry actually was in the real world,
and not as it is represented by poets and storytellers in a world
ofimagination.

Sidonia the Sorceress, first read by him in the little volumes
(Nos. 29/30) of Simm's & Maclntyre's Parlour Library when
he was a boy, "is an historical romance, based more or less on
fact, concerning the witch fever that afflicted Northern Europe
during the latter half of the 15th and the first half of the 16th
centuries. It was written by William Meinhold, a Lutheran
minister, dwelling in the island of Rugen, off the shore of
Pomerania, a man so steeped in the history of his country dur-
ing the period abovementioned, that he might almost be said
to have been living in it, rather than in his own, the early part
of the present [ 1 9th] century. The result of his life and literary
genius was the production of two books : The Amber Witch and
Sidonia the Sorceress, both of which, but, in my judgement,
especially Sidonia, are almost faultless reproductions of the life
of the past; not mere antiquarian studies, but presentments of
events, the actors in which are really alive, though under con-
ditions so different from those of the present day. In short,
Sidonia is a masterpiece of its kind, and without a rival of its
kind. It must be added that it was a great favourite with the

more literary part of the Pre-Raphaelite artists in the earlier
days of the movement."

Froissart stood alongside of Chaucer in the very front rank
of his cherished friends, and the Kelmscott Press Froissart, had
it been completed as planned, would have challenged compari-
son— primacy, it may be — as a printed book with the Chaucer
itself. Upon the text, at Morris's desire, I had spent much
time and care, and was to have spent much more. Basing
myself upon Lord Berners' translation, and preserving its
tone, spelling and style, I was to allow for the fact that the
manuscript from which he worked was not only that of an
early version, but probably damaged in places and certainly
corrupt, as well as for the further facts that the translation
was a slovenly and careless one, and that names of persons and
places had been transcribed with a reckless disregard of accur-
acy that frequently rendered them unrecognizable without
reference to the original. Every place and person would have
had to be identified, and names properly given, with certain
exceptions : Sir Walter Manny, for instance, had come to be so
intimately a part of English tradition that he was not to be
turned back into Gaultier de Mauny. Not only were gaps
to be filled, but as Froissart re-wrote and amplified his chron-
icle from time to time, any desirable additions from the
later versions were to be worked into our edition. One of
these additions, from the uncompleted manuscript now in
the Vatican, written after the chronicler had left the English
service for that of Gaston de Foix, and therefore felt free to
speak out his real mind as to the English people, particularly
delighted Morris, who translated it with a running pen when
I brought it to his attention. As the fragment is of historical
interest, giving the attitude of a medieval French aristo-
crat when faced by the comparatively free condition of the
common folk in England, and their characteristically demo-
cratic temper, and as the book in which it was to appear will
never now be printed, I give it here :

"Englishmen are of marvellous conditions, hotand boiling,
speedily moved to ire, tardily appeased and brought to mood
of mildness. They delight and comfort them in battles and
manslayings. Covetous and envious be they over greatly of
the goods of another, and they may not join them perfectly nor

1 1 1

naturally in the love nor alliance of an alien nation, and covert
they be and orgillous. And in especial under the sun is no more
perilous people than the men labouring such as be in England.
And much greatly in England is diversity betwixt the nature
and conditions of noble men and men labouring and villeins;
for the gentlemen be of noble and loyal conditions, and the
common people is offelonous, perilous, proudanddisloyal con-
ditions. And whensoever the common people will show their
felony and puissance the noble men may not endure before
them. But they have been of a long while of good accord to-
gether; for the noble men demand not of the people but that
which is of all reason. Withal the people will not suffer them
to take without paying so much as an egg or an hen. The men
of craft and the labourers throughout England live of that
which they wot how to work, and the gentlemen of their rents
and revenues: and if the King summoneth them they pay
therewith; not that the King may taile his people in no wise,
nor the people would not have it nor suffer it. There be certain
ordinances and pactions assessed on the staple of wools, and
thereof is the King aided over and above his rents and reven-
ues; and when as he maketh war the said paction is doubled.
England is the land the best guarded of the world; otherwise
they might not nor know how to live, and it behoveth a King,
who is their lord, to ordain for them and to turn him much to
their will. And if he doth the contrary, and evil come of it, ill
will they take it of him, even as they did to that King Edward
whereof I speak now, who was the son of the good King
Edward."

Syr Percyvelle de Gales, Sire Degrevaunt and Syr Tsambrace
are stories taken from another favourite of his youth, a small
volume edited by J. O. Halliwell and published by the Camden
Society in 1858. They are metrical romances or ballad-narra-
tives, translated from the Norman-French, collected and tran-
scribed by Robert Thornton of East Newton, in Yorkshire,
about 1440, the manuscript being now in the library of Lin-
coln Cathedral. Morris took much joy in one of the earlier
stanzas of Syr Percyvelle de Gales, in which it is told of the hero
that:

"He drank water of the well,
And yet was he wight ! ' '
112

niftfuJt ct tptumiek pbilcmoncfn^ fitgitmo
famulo^pca^fiigquomduie tacmpu^
to:cp paiira rcnbc.<J<3-u6 apfo^rmda qut^
tcvitieturronarcbiftojiaanafcctto ecddte
tnf afitia tcxere: § fi tioucrhnws fcptozc eo*
rulucam efle medicu. cuius laus cm cuati*
gelkv.aiaduertitmis ptter otriiawbaiUuis
animc (angucnft* c!Temedicma.1|acobus»
petru£4obanc6*iuda6* fepte epfae edide^
runt tam nrifttcas cp ftimtictas* et breues
pariteralong-as^rcucsniwrbis^otigar
tn fen tc ji tt}s: ut rams fit qui non hi earum
cecutiatic^onc*Ap>^pfi^iobi6totba^
ixt facrameta quot wba, Parii t>i^t:ct pro
mcrito volutmtiid iaus omis mferio* eft 3n
\crbie fingulis • multipliccs latet mtdltge*

TYPE OF SCHOEFFER : " B1BLIA LATINA," MAINZ, I472

jpinit liber fcidus5£>peoilu vitebumane-cpin cd et
cefatea poteftas-o* tegahs fcignitas-bubulco;* eti^
genus ftbi fpectilat faluberartia riFrpratualiftg vtte
vitoB fecu a&uebens-papam fcjcacfcinales-ataqpos*
clccicoB *# cctecoB eerie miniftroattetta * bis fpeculaoi
pfmtaenDo nmk <&intbero jainet eje Jifvciithngen
ciui pzogenito-v^bc aut comanenti Auguftcnfitattc
impteflozia in mcfciu feliritcc fremitus: Anno a pattu
Virginia falimfeto dpikftmo quardngcntefimo fep*
tuagefimoptimDrgdus veto JIanuarias terrio*

TYPE OF GUNTHER ZAINER, AUGSBURG, 1 47 1 : "SPECULUM VITAE

HUMANAE," 147 I

Books printed for friends were: Wilfrid Blunt's Love
Lyrics and Songs of Proteus, J. W. Mackail's Biblia Innocentium,
and the De Contemptu Mundi of Savonarola, printed from the
original manuscript for Charles Fairfax Murray.

Books printed for publishers were: Wardrop's transla-
tion from the Georgian of the Book of Wisdom and Lies, for
Quaritch; Tennyson's Maud, for Macmillans ; and Rossetti's
Hand and Soul, reprinted from the Germ, for Way & Williams
of Chicago. This last was the one book of which copies were
especially printed for America.

ii3

VIII

ACHIEVEMENT

Most assuredly there was no conscious element of "propa-
ganda" in Morris's determination to go in for book-printing.
Looked at in retrospect, however, it would really seem as
though there must have been something more than a mere
coincidence in his turning at this time to the one art not yet
practised by him, and bending his great powers to its mastery.
In all the other domestic arts he had proven by personal effort
that good work might still be done if it were but honestly and
without reservation attempted. A longand hard experience had
shown that preaching was relatively ineffective and agitation a
waste of time, at least for him, in face of an apathetic popu-
lace and an unreformed environment; and his disillusionment
in this regard had been completed by the disruption of the
Socialist League, and the collapse of the Commonweal. His
temperament forbade his participation in party manoeuvring
and political intrigue on the one hand, or in "gas and water
Socialism" on the other. That which he did must be done in
the light of day, without compromise or diplomacy, and that
which he said must be said as definitely as words would allow,
without mental reservation or any concession to vote-catch-
ing possibilities; and he could summon up no enthusiasm for
local or partial attempts at the palliation of the more obtrusive
miseries of society, while allowing what were for him the main
evils to remain untouched. This he held to be tinkering with
symptoms instead of attacking disease.

Then, although the fact was as yet unsuspected and re-
mained unknown until too late, his titan strength had been
overtaxed by his arduous and long-continued labours as an

114

"agitator," unaccompanied and uncompensated for by any
mitigation of his creative activities in many fields, and his
constitution undermined by repeated attacks of influenza.
Neither he nor anyone among those around him realized that
his life was already on the wane; three years later, as we have
seen, the Athenaeum could still speak of his perennial youthful-
ness. Nor did he despair as to the ultimate and speedy, though
disillusioned as to the immediate, success of the endeavour "to
make this world a beautiful and happy place" in which he had
played such a prominent part. Indeed, upon this point, as
Clutton Brock has written: "Everyone now, except the very
stupid, knows that this world is less beautiful and less happy
than it might be. We have all lost the Victorian complacency
which was so like despair. We do not believe in the mechan-
ical action of progress, or that our civilization has been freed
for ever from the peril and beauty of the past; we know that it
can only be preserved from peril and restored to beauty by the
constant exercise of our own wills; we have both a conviction
of sin and a hope of salvation; and we owe both to William
Morris more than to any other single man."

Looking back upon his rounded life, seen as it now is from
a distance, one cannot help feeling that, dissatisfied with pre-
cept, and however unconscious that his future years were to be
but few, he gave all the remaining time and strength at his
disposal to providing an example and a proof, concrete and
unmistakable, of the practicality of his theories and the truth of
his contentions.

Nobody nowadays can dispute the massive reality of his
contributions to the beauty of life, or cavil at the claim that his
influence upon taste and thought has been both widespread
and permanent. "The last quarter of the 19th century will
always remain a memorable period, if only by reason of the
artistic revival which has distinguished it above its fellows,"
wrote A. L. Cotton in an article already quoted from. "If,
indeed, we are still far from having attained the ideal looked
forward to by William Morris, that Utopian commonwealth
in which our workmen shall be artists and our artists work-
men, at least the initial difficulty has been overcome, and the
first step taken in the right direction. . . . Despite ourselves,
perhaps, our views in matters of art have undergone a steady

revolution. The change has been largely imperceptible, but
has been lasting in effect. There is hardly a single object in
daily and habitual use among us which has not, in some way, ,
received the impress of the movement inaugurated by [him]."
Before he commenced printer, however, there was one "single
object in daily and habitual use" that had not been affected by
the movement which owed its origin and impetus to Morris,
and that was the printed book.

A rough idea of the state of book-printing in 1888 has been
given in a previous chapter, but no adequate notion of the
depths to which it had fallen, or the apparent hopelessness of
its position, can possibly be formed without an examination of
the books that were then being printed. To-day, though there
is, unhappily, a great deal to be done still, and the commercial
book-printer has only indirectly been touched by Morris's
teaching or example, more books are being decently pro-
duced than at any other time since the 1 6th century. Morris's
achievement, then, has been threefold: he has left us an im-
perishable treasure in the books printed by himself; he set up
a precedent that has been extensively followed ; and he inaugu-
rated a reform which will in the end affect the whole of the
western world, and has already affected a great part of it, lead-
ing sometimes to developments at which he would have roared
with rage or laughter, stultified oftentimes by the inherent re-
action of industrialism or the craze for "self-expression," but
never losing ground on a large scale, and gaining solidity and
force as it goes.

There had been private presses in England before Morris
founded his, but none of them had seriously influenced the
general practice of book-printing. Walpole's books from
Strawberry Hill were neither better nor worse than those of
the trade-printer of his time. The Rev. Mr. Daniels of Ox-
ford, Morris's immediate predecessor, though more ambitious
and far more successful, contented himself with reviving the
1 7th century Fell types, and accepting what paper and ink he
could find upon the market. Nobody until Morris did so had
returned to the origin of book-printing, attacked the problem
of planning and making a book as a whole and in detail, or
studied the contributory crafts — the designing, cutting and
casting of type, the making of paper and vellum, and so on —

116

and either practised them himself or directed and supervised
their practice by others, with a comprehensive eye to their
function and value as factors telling towards the success or
failure of the book. Let the importance of his material triumphs
be belittled, the beauty of his books disputed, the validity of his
teaching either by practice or precept be denied, there would
yet remain to his credit that he was the pioneer in these re-
spects, and a pioneer who has inspired many notable successors
to attempt and achieve great things, things that were unthink-
able until he had shown them to be within the limits of prac-
ticability. In this place it would be an impertinence, even if it
lay with me, to appraise the work or discriminate between the
merits of the private and semi-private presses which have con-
tinued to keep open the road of experiment and improvement
inaugurated by Morris. But I may be allowed to claim that
at no period, since the earliest printers were confronted with
the manifold possibilities of a new and fascinating art, have
there been so many disinterested, nobly conceived and success-
ful attempts at coping with the problems and extending the
triumphs of the printer's craft as during the years that have
elapsed since the closing of the Kelmscott Press.

When one turns to book-printing in general, the printing
of books as an industry, the change wrought by Morris is evi-
dent, real and wide-reaching, though by no means universal.
Though good book-printing is far more possible, and far
better book-printing being done, than in pre-Kelmscott days,
the forces of reaction are as powerful as ever, and, indeed, have
been reinforced by certain wouldbe and well-intentioned re-
formers ; there are crying abuses to be remedied, stupidities to
be overcome, errors to be corrected, and this must continue to
be so until many other evils have been redressed. But there
is no reason, other than those afforded by ignorance or by in-
ertia, why still more good and still better book-printing should
not now and at once be done, even under the conditions which
obtain.

Of course, the commercial book-printer is and must con-
tinue to be handicapped, though he need not be paralysed, by
these conditions, and it would obviously be unfair to demand
of him that he should equal the productions of a private press,
working in freedom from the restrictions of the market-place.

117

For him to aim at a standard higher than that which prevails
in the market-place is to incur the contemptuous enmity, and
invite the imitative and pricecutting competition, of those for
whom there is no nobler incentive than money-snatching.
And the public taste, though better than it was, is too inchoate
and uncertain to impose a definite level of excellence, below
which his printing might only fall at his peril; nor can he
count upon the support of more than an intelligent and taste-
ful minority among publishers. While he may, and often
does, make a place for himself, attracting a public of his own,
he is uneasily conscious that his public may only be supporting
him because he is "different," being ready to desert him to-
morrow in favour of a rival who is " different" after a more flam-
boyant or eccentric fashion. And all the time he is being
tempted — or, too often, compelled by circumstances — to
lessen the effect of his work and lower the taste of his public,
deflower his best letter, his most careful and skilful make-
up and presswork, through their use for publicity. It is a re-
grettable fact that, from the purely technical point of view,
no better printing is being done to-day than that which is
devoted to the purposes of advertisement, because "there is
money in it."

Morris refused absolutely to allow his type or ornaments
to be utilized in this way. The advertising-men who made
him large offers were offended by his obstinate and, to them,
incomprehensible, refusal. They understood his attitude as
little as did the inkmakers, of whom he demanded a better ink
than they were prepared to supply, imagining that it meant
enmity to advertising in itself, and regarding his refusal as a
slight upon their profession. It cannot be pretended that
Morris felt any respect or admiration for advertisement in
itself, or looked upon it otherwise than as one of the phases of
latterday commercialism. But his refusal raised no question
as to the morality or desirability of advertising, as things are,
nor as to the duty of a printer, if he print publicity-stuff at all,
to print it as well as ever he can. It was based entirely upon
another consideration, in his eyes a grave one: that the em-
ployment of given material and a given style to advocate the
buying of this or that, reduces their value and militates against
their effect when they are applied to a more dignified purpose.

118

If a certain^ letter, for example, come to be familiarly associ-
ated with alarm-clocks or underclothing, it must necessarily be
less effective when employed upon a noble poem or one of the
stories or plays which count among the enduring glories of
the world. Not only have its intrinsic merits been obscured,
if not obliterated, by the trivialities with which the reader
cannot help connecting it, but, what is worse, its lower associa-
tions reflect upon all other work in which it appears. The
most enthusiastic devotee of advertising can hardly claim that
it conduces to the due effect of the Pilgrim's Progress or Holy
Living and Dying to read them in a type and get-up which
irresistibly recalls the flavour of canned peaches, the durability
of a motor-tyre, or the bargain sales of some Elite Emporium.

Not that the decision on this point wholly rests with the
individual printer; though he himself may rigidly refuse to
venalize his material and his talents, there is nothing to pro-
tect him from an unscrupulous competitor, who stands ready
to parody his best work, turning to account all that he has
given to honouring some great author on behalf of a mail-
order house or even some fraudulent oil company. It is prac-
tically impossible for him to have a distinctive letter of his own,
to be sternly reserved for his less ephemeral and more digni-
fied productions, for work in which he can take pride and upon
which he can stake his reputation, while a make-up, once made
public, is open to the world. To obtain a new letter, or any
letter at all, he must go to a big firm of typefounders, as the
"little master" who cut his punches and cast his type, like
Howard, is dead; the punchcutter, like E. P. Prince, who was
a free craftsman and frequently an artist, has followed him ;
and the machinery for cutting punches and casting type is
beyond the reach of a single man or a small company. So long
as a printer must be content with type which is available at a
price to anybody, he may himself restrict the use of a letter to
some chosen purpose, but is unable to guard himself against
the vulgarity of his rivals. Whether this need mean that any
book-printer resign himself to doing less than his best is for
the individual to decide.

It is, of course, expecting a good deal of the average printer,
or the average business man of any kind, bred up in a com-
mercial atmosphere, trained under industrial conditions, and

119

accustomed to accept the limitations of the market as though
these were fixed and inherent in the nature of things, to ask
that he shall stand outside of and above his habitual round,
facing that which has become a second nature as though it
were new to him. Yet, if he is to understand what Morris
taught and was, or profit by what Morris did for him, this and
no less is exactly what he must do. In order to do it, he must
needs follow Morris's example, centre his thought upon the
book as an organic entity, take the book as pivot of inquiry and
research, of practice and experiment, subordinating all other
considerations to the welfare of the BOOK.

If he succeed in doing this, and in the measure of his suc-
cess, he will be delivered from the influence of one or two
prevalent fallacies. The worst and most widespread of these
is that, seeing he is compelled to print by machine, he must
study the machine before all, and plan his book in such a way
as to bring it well within the capabilities of the plant and
machinery at his disposal. In thinking thus, however, he is
thinking in terms of topsyturveydom, exalting the instrument
at the expense of the outcome, the means at the expense of the
end, kultur at the expense of culture. For the machine is no
more than an instrument, and not in the last resort the most
indispensable instrument, utilized for book-production. It is
at once an aid and a hindrance towards the attainment of that
end ; an aid in so far as it facilitates production in quantity and
with speed ; a hindrance in so far as it achieves this at the cost of
quality in the product, restricting the range of choice with
regard to type and paper and ink, barring the best of each by
its inability to deal with the best. Morris installed the hand-
press for his work, and not a machine. He found that his
letter would have to be thinned, his paper softened and his
ink diluted, thereby destroying the beauty of his book, were
he to submit himself to the limitations thought by ordinary
printers to be imposed by the machine. That his choice was
reluctantly made cannot for a moment be pretended; for
he knew that hand-work means doing one's utmost as a
man, with tools which aid the work without eliminating or
lessening the manhood of the worker; that, as he often said,
anything which intervenes between the hand and its work is
bad for both ; and that the machine, if taken as more than a

120

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FACSIMILE OF A PAGE OF MORRIS'S MANUSCRIPT FOR THE PROPOSED
EDITION OF FROISSART

tool, if accepted as the prime factor, entails the dehumaniza-
tion of the workman, until the work is no longer that of a tool-
armed man but that of a "hand"-aided machine.

Although the machine be inevitable under industrial con-
ditions, and the hand-press out of the question for a book-
printer to whom book-printing is a business, this need not
mean that he contentedly reverse the true position of affairs,
take the machine as his arbiter of excellence and forget that it
is but an instrument, an extremely imperfect instrument, for
the production of a beautiful book, of which he is to make the
best he can, always demanding more than it can yet give,
striving after the unattainable. Nor need it mean, as it so often
does, that because he is using a complex and costly contriv-
ance, into the perfecting of which many other men's brains have
been put, he should imagine himself to stand upon a higher
intellectual and artistic level than his fathers, for whom there
was no such resource. If he will but compare fifteenth century
books, or those produced within the last thirty years by similar
methods, with machine-printed books, his own or those of
others, he will be driven to admit, however grudgingly, that,
even if he dare to claim superiority for the latter, that superi-
ority is not commensurate with the inventive ingenuity and
long-continued endeavour which have gone into an up-to-date
machine press ; and he will find it hard to account for the small
margin of the pretended superiority, relatively to the enormous
improvement in appliances, without confessing that he and his
like are inferior as men and as book-printers to the men who
wrought such magnificent results with such comparatively
primitive tools.

A similar fallacy or confusion of means with end, affecting
a printer's choice of letter, is that upon which a heresy was
erected by Charles Ricketts and adopted with enthusiasm by
wouldbe modernists: that inasmuch as a necessary step to-
wards the casting of type is cutting punches in steel, the letter
must be conceived as being cut in metal, and as a consequence
owe nothing to pen-written precedent or the traditions of
handwriting. Morris, as has been described in its place, re-
turned to the tradition followed by the great Italian printers,
conceiving his letter as they did upon the established lines of
calligraphy. Every good letter, for him, was derived in greater

121

or less degree from the pen, and the more obvious the relation-
ship, the more likely was the letter to be good. Ricketts —
logically, as he fondly supposed — imagined his characters in
terms of metal-cutting, holding that he was thereby freed from
restraints imposed by the pen, which were to be replaced by
those inherent in the material upon which he supposed himself
to be at work. Hitherto, the question has been discussed as
though it were merely a quarrel over two equally-valid con-
ventions, and even some of those who ought to have known
better have hesitated as to which convention they should
accept. By taking the book as their criterion, however, and
remembering that the book is essentially no more and no less
than an instrument for the conveyance of articulate speech in
its written form from the hand of a writer to the eye of a reader,
they would, I think, be speedily convinced that the metal-
cutting heresy arises from and rests upon a two-fold fallacy.
First, there is a confusion of terms, caused by the common but
ambiguous use of "type" for the letter as it stands upon the
page, as well as for the "type" which impresses it upon the
paper. Second, a double confusion of means with end; for,
when all is said and done, the cut-metal punch is but a means
towards the production of cast-metal type, and the cast-metal
type, in its turn, but a means towards the production of read-
able words upon paper. To determine the form and character
of the letter in accordance with the procedure of metal-cutting
is, therefore, not merely to raise the means to a greater im-
portance than the end, but to do so at a double remove.

"The eye, after all, is the sovereign judge of form," and,
provided that the eye be satisfied as to the legibility and beauty
of the letter, the means and method of producing that letter are
of small or no account. Though the letter be cut in stone, en-
graved upon metal or wood, written upon paper or parchment
with a pen — reed, quill, steel or gold — painted upon wood or
canvas with a brush, or printed upon paper or vellum from
type, its convention or traditional accord with convenience is
determined by the eyei and not by the tool employed for its
production. To the eye, indeed, the letter itself is but a means
to an end, the formation of words ; and to the reader's brain
behind the eye, the words are but a means towards the con-
veyance of a message from the mind of a writer to his own. No

122

matter what has happened in the interval, the position is essen-
tially the same as it was when the written book first came into
being: on one side is the writer, with his pen in his hand, and
on the other is the reader, with his book before his eyes.

Through the interposition of the printer, with his press and
his type, and the rest, dependent upon other specialists for
everything he uses, many things and many men have come to
stand between the writer and the book, but nothing stands be-
tween the book and the reader. Set apart as he personally is
from the finished book, the writer is not only deprived of direct
access to the reader, but of the flexibility and freedom of ex-
pression through form as well as through substance that were
his as of right when there was nothing but the pen between his
hand and the page which reached the reader's eye. It was an
intuitive recognition of the loss thus incurred which led to
Morris's momentary recoil as the Press came into being: "I
couldn't help lamenting the simplicity of the scribe and his
desk, and his black ink and blue and red ink, and I almost felt
ashamed of my press after all."

Though the interval between the penman and the final page
has been lengthened, however, and the connexion between
writer and reader thereby weakened, through the increasing
introduction of machinery at all stages of book-making, the con-
nexion is there still. However much the number of machines,
and therefore of mechanicalized men, has been multiplied by
the specialization of processes, and the chain thereby length-
ened, we still have the human mind and heart at one end of
the chain, expressing itself through the human hand, and the
human mind and heart at the other, impressed by the thought
and feeling conveyed to it through the eye. Our endeavour
should therefore be to think and plan in terms of the hand and
the eye as the determining factors in all problems affecting
the boo^ minimizing the resistance of interposed machinery or
process, and not to erect that resistance into a desirable barrier,
counting the loss of spontaneity and freedom as a gain. It is
upon the hand and the eye we must insist, and in consonance
with whose requirements we must reform or form our conven-
tions, not upon or according to the accidental properties of
any material or tool or appliance.

Handicapped as he is by commercial exigencies, industrial

123

conditions, lack of discriminative support on the part of pub-
lishers or of the public, and the wrongheaded preachings of
this or that authority, there is yet much that any book-printer
may do towards raising the artistic level of his productions.
That is, if he is courageous enough to think things out for him-
self, is equipped with a fair share of commonsense, and will
accept these two considerations to go on with : that it is the book
which matters; that the eye, after all, is the sovereign judge of
form. Setting aside all questions of type and paper and print-
ing by machine, there are many gross defects in book-building
to-day that may be remedied at once, and at the cost of no more
than a little thought and care.

Taking the run of books as they come, there is no more
common or glaring defect in the average book than that of a
want of rhythmic balance in the opening, the failure of two
opposite pages to hang together, the two black masses of letter-
press and the margins which surround them forming a pleasant
unity through their harmonious reconciliation of repetition
and contrast. The two opposite pages are and must be seen
together, should appeal to and satisfy the eye at once and to-
gether, and it is impossible to make a book beautiful or even
passably decent-seeming if this be neglected. By considering
each page as though it were to stand alone, and be seen in isola-
tion, a result is obtained by which the eye is offended, and a
natural sense of proportion outraged. Taking a single page as
the unit, reckoning in the headline as part of it, and then plant-
ing the mass of letterpress with mechanical precision in the
centre of the page, giving a hard equality to the margins, the
opening is made to appear as though it were standing on its
head, while the opposing pages look as though they were being
driven asunder and stand at odds.

Even when the opening has been duly considered, the head-
line is a nuisance, is a disastrous addition of ugliness when it
has not, and is an indefensible stupidity in any case. Either a
reader knows and is interested in what he is reading about or
he is not; in the one case, he does not need, and in the second
pays no attention to, a constantly repeated reminder of the title
or theme of the book he is reading. Upon utilitarian grounds,
therefore, there is nothing to be said in defence of the headline
from the point of view of the reader; from that of the printer it

124

might be defended as "fat," a minor fraud upon the purchaser
of the book, though that is not a plea to be urged in the high
court of taste. Nor can it be pleaded that the headline is decor-
ative, has ever been or can ever be made so; at its best it is a
mere excrescence, and at its worst a monstrosity. When com-
bined with one or two other of the weaknesses which beset
modern printing, it is intolerable.

Before me lies a pretentiously printed volume, a serious and
valuable work upon an important subject, recently and expen-
sively produced, upon which publisher and printer quite obvi-
ously pride themselves. Each page is topped with a funereally
heavy headline, with a thin black line above it and a thin-and-
thick black line below. Then comes the letterpress, in a meagre-
faced letter, too much compressed and over-thinned, the words
being widely spaced and the lines heavily leaded. The page
has been reckoned from the upper thin line of the heading to
the lowermost line of the type, and set squarely in the middle
of the paper, allowance being made for a "generous" margin.
To put it mildly, the opening is crudely horrible, and the separ-
ate pages, each with its unescapable headline, looking like a
ponderous curtain-rod, its air of time-worn pallor and of tumb-
ling to pieces, of hanging precariously and far too low, remind
one in their general appearance of nothing so much as of
disintegrating window-blinds. No single element in all this
conglomerate of ugliness was forced upon the printer or the
publisher by anything else than their common lack of taste
and thought.

For the stupidities currently indulged in with regard to
misfit illustrations, the printer may fairly repudiate responsi-
bility ; but, at the least, he must be held for an accomplice, both
before and after the fact, unless he has drawn the attention of
publisher and artist to incongruities between illustrations and
letterpress, doing what he can to enlist their co-operation in
planning and building the book as a concordant whole. Most
publishers care as little for the organic unity of the book as does
the unenlightened public, and leave the illustrations to the
artist, the typography to the printer, failing to ensure or even
to ask for a mutual subordination of personal idiosyncrasies to
the needs of the book. Should they do so, their main difficulty
would undoubtedly lie with the artist, who has usually taken

125

over or worked out a convention that suits him, and is as mark-
edly different as he can make it from that which has been
adopted by anybody else. In order to display his originality,
he must, as he thinks, be "different" at all costs, and unless he
be an artist in the full sense of the term, will refuse to submit
his proud neck to the yoke of co-operative effort, as Burne-
Jones did without hesitation or afterthought. Upon this point,
as upon all others, it is the great man or true artist who can
stoop to concede a certain measure of independence without
loss of dignity or lessened worth of achievement, or face the
required effort with resolute goodwill.

For an effort is unmistakably required of the artist who
consents to think of and work for the book in the absence of an
apprenticeship to so doing. Even among the Kelmscott Press
books, there is a case in point, that of the unluckiest of them
all in this respect, the twice printed Glittering Plain. The first
edition of this, and the first book printed at the Press, fell
short of Morris's ideal through the lack of harmony and pro-
portion between "bloomers" and body-letter, partly due to
the enforced use of initials designed for a larger page, but in
part also to the fact that Morris had not yet related their line
and tone to those of his letter, as he was able to do after a little
more practice and experience. The pioneer of a new field, he
had to find his way by trial-and-error. While it is wholly free
from this particular defect, the second edition of the Glittering
Plain is marred by a disagreement between the pictures of
Walter Crane and Morris's letter and decorations. Walter
Crane's drawings, which are generically Renaissance in char-
acter, suffer from, and at the same time avenge, their intrusion
upon a Gothic page, and the quarrel of styles is intensified by
their striking difference in line and colour from the letterpress
with which they are in contact.

Taking what Morris wrote as to illustration in conjunction
with what may be deduced from his practice, there are at least
four requirements which must be regarded as fundamental for
an illustration intended to go with type: (a) There should be
in it no line much thinner than the thins nor much thicker than
the thicks of the body-letter; (b) there should be approxi-
mately the same ratio of black to white in any one square inch
of the drawing that there is in any one square inch of the typo-

126

graphy; (c) the character and tone of the lines used in the
drawing should repeat or "play up to" those of the type in
straightness or curvature, no less than in colour; (d) it must
be confined within a definite frame or outline. Any one of
these fundamentals can only be lost sight of at the expense of
beauty, but for the perfection of beauty there must also be a
reciprocal sympathy between cut and page that may readily be
felt but far from readily described in words.

When all illustrations were engraved on wood, the en-
graver served as an intermediary between the artist and the
printer, unconsciously rather than consciously reconciling the
illustration to the letterpress. How great was the role he
played in this regard, and how suddenly and completely the
illustration stood away from the type when he had been super-
seded, may be studied in the volume of Punch which covered
the period of transition. In the earlier part of the volume,
wood-engraving reigns alone ; then for a while there is a grow-
ing proportion of process-blocks; finally, the photographic
process has relegated wood-engraving for ever to the limbo of
dead crafts. There had been little or no community of tradi-
tion between artist and wood-engraver for many years; the
artist, more and more possessed of a sense of his own import-
ance, had been undergoing the universal prompting towards
the assertion of his own individuality, towards what is now
called "self-expression," and had come to resent the liberties,
as he considered them, taken by the engraver with his work.
He rejoiced, therefore, and revelled in his new-found free-
dom from restraint, his unrestrained ability to develop his own
convention and indulge in his own distinctive mannerisms,
without regard for or interference from anybody but himself.
What had hitherto been open to the original etcher or engraver
upon metal was now open to the draughtsman, without any
of the apprenticeship or preliminary discipline which these
had been compelled to undergo. He took and takes full ad-
vantage of the opportunity, and as a result it can hardly be
said that book-illustration as an art contributory to the book
stands higher to-day than it did at its nadir, in the later years of
the 1 8 th and earlier years of the 1 9th century.

On my table is a luxury-book, the text of which is from the
pen of a well-known writer, with illustrations from the pencil

127

of an equally well-known artist, and bearing the imprints of a
printer and a publisher of standing. It is printed in a thick-
faced letter, grossly over-leaded, while the illustrations have
clearly been drawn upon a large scale, in a line which was con-
gruous to that particular scale, without thought or care for what
it would be like when reduced, as it has been, to a scale upon
which the line looks as though it were that of a dusty spider's
web, the whites between the lines having been kept open only
through the skill of the printer. Against the grey frailty of the
pictures, the lubberly black and white stripes of the typo-
graphy stand out as an offence, and the discrepancy is em-
phasized by the refusal of the illustrator to recognize a frame
or condescend upon an outline, leaving the printer to fit his
type in painful zigzags and staircases to the wilfully erratic
form of each drawing. Thus, with a thick black-faced letter
to give the plane of the page, and the broken irregularity of
the letterpress around them, the lack-lustre illustrations have
all the air of being recessed into, or having fallen through, a
collapsed and shattered surface.

Had the illustrator cared for aught but his own drawing as
it grew under his hand, or given a thought to its appearance
when reduced and printed with letterpress; had the publisher
cared for anything beyond the saleability of the volume; had
the printer been proud enough of his craft to have called their
attention to the state of affairs before it was too late: had any
one of them possessed an atom of knowledge or good taste, or
considered the look of the book, they might have produced a
seemly volume, one that a man would keep near at hand upon
his most-visited shelves, instead of perpetrating an outrage
upon good manners — for it is nothing less than that.

Handicapped as all men engaged in book-production may
be, there is no excuse for sheer carelessness, and but small
excuse for ignorance, now that Morris's work and Morris's
teaching are open to all.

Henry Arthur Jones, when presenting a copy of the Kelms-
cott Chaucer to the Library of Harvard University, wrote that
it was "the loving handiwork of the greatest man I have
known. It may be claimed for William Morris that his repu-
tation would be a high and honourable one if it rested upon
anyone of his achievements: upon his poetry alone; his tales

128

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FOR HIS BED AT KELMSCOTT

and essays alone; his dyeing alone; his weaving alone; his
tapestry alone ; his cabinet work alone ; his printing alone. In
every one of these arts he accomplished the good and faithful
work of an ordinary lifetime. He abides with us as a living
witness to the essential unity of art; he continually affirms that,
like the other two great realities, like religion, like love, it is
something that must be bought without money and without
price. . . . The main idea of his later years was a hatred of the
base commercialism which has degraded the ordinary work-
man from an artist into a machine, and has cheapened and
demoralized and disfigured the whole fabric of modern civil-
ization. But this hatred was not sullen or stagnant; it accom-
panied an active ceaseless search for a social lever that would
again raise the workman into the artist, and thereby bring
dignity and simplicity and beauty into ordinary everyday
homes."

"He abides with us as a living witness," and more defin-
itely so through the latest enterprise of his earthly life, as it
seems to me, than in any other upon which he entered. His
wonderful stained glass and his yet more wonderful tapestries
are necessarily localized, and cannot be made readily accessible
to many, even when they are housed in public institutions and
open to all comers. His woven and printed stuffs, his furni-
ture and wallpapers, despite the soundness of their material
and the stability of their colouring, are innately perishable and
exposed to the depreciation and accidents entailed by usage.
His written works, though his poetry prove to be as imperish-
able as that of Homer or of Shakespeare, his romances as those
of Sir Walter Scott or Dumas or Dickens, his essays upon art
and life as those of Ruskin or Carlyle, must suffer as these have
done from the limitations of language, and in any case can
appeal only to those who are capable of sustained attention and
articulate thought. But his printed books are appreciable by
all those who have eyes to see with, and their message is intelli-
gible in all tongues.

Though the demand for sets of the Kelmscott Press books
may continue, and many sets be hoarded in comparative
secrecy by mere collectors, set after set is finding a safe and
accessible refuge in a library which is not a collector's book-
museum, or the private playground of a cataloguer, but a veri-

129 K

table home of learning, opened hospitably to the student.
Then, if it comes to that, no more than a hundred-and-fifty
"complete sets" can ever be made up, the number of copies
printed of De Contemptu Mundi\ thus ensuring that single
copies or a few will always be findable by a devotee — that is,
until the far day when all shall have passed into national or
communal possession. And it needs but the sight — or, still
better, the handling — of a single Kelmscott Press book to con-
vince any bookman or printer, tinged with artistry, that here
is a standard of attainable excellence, a milestone and a finger-
post upon the secular path of book-printing.

A standard of comparison by which to judge contempor-
ary work, one's own or that of another, but not a model to be
slavishly imitated; a milestone to mark progress, but not a ter-
minal barrier to bring it to an end ; a finger-post indicating the
direction in which an advance may be made, but not an imper-
ative command to go along one particular path to the exclusion
of all others, or to do so upon any other than our own feet. To
set up the Kelmscott Press books, in type or format, style or
decoration, as archetypes of perfection to reproduce or approach
which all future books are to endeavour or be condemned, is
to negate the whole gospel of art according to Morris. That
would be to repeat the mistake of the Renaissance, which
worked and lived with its eyes upon the past, instead of learn-
ing the Gothic lesson, untiringly taught by Morris, that a
vital tradition takes its inspiration and encouragement from
the past — "what man has done, man can do" — but without
seeking to mould the present upon the outworn pattern of the
past, or to restrain the free spirit of man from planning and
working towards a nobler world in the future. For there is
the main distinction between the Renaissance and the Gothic
views of art and of life : the Renaissance thought of the Golden
Age as gone by, only to be regained by a literal reproduction
of dead things and ideas; while the Gothic builder took only
from the past that which was useful to him in the present,
and set his Golden Age in front of him, to be grown up to and
approached — though, it might be, never attained — through
dauntless aspiration and untiring effort.

To deduce an authoritative code of rules from what Morris
did or what he said, and to apply those rules without careful

130

discrimination to the needs, facilities and intentions of to-day,
would be to falsify his teaching and belittle his example. For,
if there be one truth upon which he most often and most em-
phatically insisted, it is that no man may save his artistic soul
alive by a servile adherence to ready-made rules, but can only
do so by carrying through his own inborn creative impulse at
all costs, though in accordance with commonsense, and that
observance of rhythmic order and restrained harmony which,
if he be an artist at all, will be for him instinctive. The dis-
cipline of a living tradition, as Morris tried to revive and apply
it, has nothing and can have nothing in common with tyranny
or the reign of the dead hand. It is, on the contrary, a steadily
revivified and revivifying body of counsel and advice, "for edi-
fication but not for doctrine," which a beginner may only dis-
regard at his peril, which the master workman will treat with
respect, but to be accepted by neither as a register of unchanged
and unchangeable decrees.

When the world has tired of its Moloch-worship, of en-
throning the machine as its god and ruler, of accepting a me-
chanicalized commercialism as its philosophy of life, of sacri-
ficing the natural beauty of the earth to its greed, of wasting
the accumulated riches due to the creative powers of Man in
the past, and frustrating all that these powers might effect in
the present, it will turn to William Morris as to its prophet and
guide. In him it will find a wise teacher, whose knowledge
was rooted in experience and verified by practice, a man who
wrought out his ideals in every walk and relation of life, leaving
an unparalleled example of high endeavour and noble achieve-
ment, and yet was at no point remote from the ordinary man.
For the ordinary man, indeed, if he but seek to do good work
within the limits of his own craft, understanding that through
his work alone can he realize himself at his highest, and that if
his work be done in fellowship, not only is his work ennobled
but he himself along with it, there is no recorded life which
affords the encouragement and inspiration to be found in that
of William Morris.

J3i

EPILOGUE

Almost in the act of putting the last touches to this work,
the Author was taken from us suddenly and painlessly, and
it falls to the lot of a friend of nearly forty years' standing to
see it through the press with the final revision he would have
given. It had long been a cherished ambition of his to set
down at length his memories of the great artist and craftsman
who had been to him, as to so many others, an inspiration ;
and it was a crowning pleasure to him that he should at last
have been able to give them to the public in a form not un-
worthy of their subject. He would have specially disliked any
intrusion of a personal note into a work solely dedicated to
the memory of William Morris, so that nothing can here be
said of the considerable bulk and importance of his writings
or of the personal qualities which endeared him to a wide
circle of friends; and it does not become me to dwell on the
value and importance of this record, which unites, through
the generosity of the trustees of the Kelmscott Press, a full
reprint of a work which has become scarce and expensive with
a volume of personal reminiscences covering the period of its
inception and early growth by one who was on close terms
of familiarity with its founder. The records of conversations
with William Morris are not, it is true, founded on notes taken
at the time, and their authenticity depends on the deep impres-
sion made on the hearer, but apart from the question of strict
verbal accuracy I am, from my own knowledge, assured that,
as in the case of another disciple of Morris in similar circum-
stances, there is " nothing in these pages that is not true in cir-
cumstance and substance, if not in every instance in precise de-
lineation and phrase, of what actually occurred." This book is,
as far as human effort can make it, accurate and complete, and
the spirit and honesty with which it is written is some measure
of the effect produced on every one who came in contact with
William Morris. And thus I bid farewell to my friend, with
the words on his tombstone quoted from the last paragraph of

thisbook ROBERT STEELE

HE SOUGHT TO DO GOOD WORK WITHJN
THE LIMITS OF HIS OWN CRAFT

APPENDIX

(Reprinted from the last book printed at the Kelmscott Press, 1898)

A Note by William Morris on his Aims in founding
the Kelmscott Press.

A Short Description of the Press, by S. C. Cockerell.

An Annotated List of the Books printed thereat, by
S. C. Cockerell.

A NOTE BY WILLIAM MORRIS ON HIS AIMS
IN FOUNDING THE KELMSCOTT PRESS

I began printing books with the hope of producing some which
would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time
they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or
trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the
letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy
of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which took its
place. As to the fifteenth century books, I had noticed that
they were always beautiful by force of the mere typography,
even without the added ornament, with which many of them are
so lavishly supplied. And it was the essence of my undertak-
ing to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon
as pieces of printing and arrangement of type. Looking at my
adventure from this point of view then, I found I had to con-
sider chiefly the following things : the paper, the form of the
type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the lines,
and lastly the position of the printed matter on the page.

It was a matter of course that I should consider it necessary
that the paper should be hand-made, both for the sake of dur-
ability and appearance. It would be a very false economy to
stint in the quality of the paper as to price: so I had only to
think about the kind of hand-made paper. On this head I
came to two conclusions : ist, that the paper must be wholly of
linen (most hand-made papers are of cotton to-day), and must
be quite "hard," i.e. thoroughly well sized; and 2nd, that
though it must be "laid" and not "wove" (i.e. made on a mould
made of obvious wires), the lines caused by the wires of the
mould must not be too strong, so as to give a ribbed appear-
ance. I found that on these points I was at one with the prac-
tice of the papermakers of the fifteenth century; so I took as

*3S

my model a Bolognese paper of about 1473. My friend Mr.
Batchelor, of Little Chart, Kent, carried out my views very
satisfactorily, and produced from the first the excellent paper
which I still use.

Next as to type. By instinct rather than by conscious
thinking it over, I began by getting myself a fount of Roman
type. And here what I wanted was letter pure in form ; severe,
without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening
and thinning of the line, which is the essential fault of the
ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read;
and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be
owing to commercial exigencies. There was only one source
from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to
wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth
century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced the completest
and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. This type I
studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big scale,
and drawing it over many times before I began designing my
own letter; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it,
I did not copy it servilely; in fact, my Roman type, especially
in the lower case, tends rather more to the Gothic than does
Jenson's.

After a while I felt that I must have a Gothic as well as a
Roman fount; and herein the task I set myself was to redeem
the Gothic character from the charge of unreadableness which
is commonly brought against it. And I felt that this charge
could not be reasonably brought against the types of the first
two decades of printing: that Schoeffer at Mainz, Mentelin
at Strasburg, and Gunther Zainer at Augsburg, avoided the
spiky ends and undue compression which lay some of the later
printers open to the above charge. Only the earlier printers
(naturally following therein the practice of their predecessors
the scribes) were very liberal of contractions, and used an ex-
cess of "tied" letters, which, by the way, are very useful to the
compositor. So I entirely eschewed contractions, except for
the "&," and had very few tied letters, in fact none but the
absolutely necessary ones. Keeping my end steadily in view,
I designed a black-letter type which I think I may claim to be
as readable as a Roman one, and to say the truth I prefer it to
the Roman. This type is of the size called Great Primer (the

136

Roman type is of "English" size) ; but later on I was driven by
the necessities of the Chaucer (a double-columned book) to
get a smaller Gothic type of Pica size.

The punches for all these types, I may mention, were cut
for me with great intelligence and skill by Mr. E. P. Prince,
and render my designs most satisfactorily.

Now as to the spacing : First, the "face" of the letter should
be as nearly conterminous with the "body" as possible, so as
to avoid undue whites between the letters. Next, the lateral
spaces between the words should be {a) no more than is neces-
sary to distinguish clearly the division into words, and (b)
should be as nearly equal as possible. Modern printers, even
the best, pay very little heed to these two essentials of seemly
composition, and the inferior ones run riot in licentious spac-
ing, thereby producing, inter alia, those ugly rivers of lines
running about the page which are such a blemish to decent
printing. Third, the whites between the lines should not be
excessive; the modern practice of "leading" should be used as
little as possible, and never without some definite reason, such
as marking some special piece of printing. The only leading
I have allowed myself is in some cases a "thin" lead between
the lines of my Gothic pica type; in the Chaucer and the
double-columned books I have used a "hair" lead, and not even
this in the 1 6mo books. Lastly, but by no means least, comes
the position of the printed matter on the page. This should
always leave the inner margin the narrowest, the top some-
what wider, the outside (fore-edge) wider still, and the bottom
widest of all. This rule is never departed from in medieval
books, written or printed. Modern printers systematically
transgress against it; thus apparently contradicting the fact
that the unit of a book is not one page, but a pair of pages. A
friend, the librarian of one of our most important private
libraries, tells me that after careful testing he has come to the
conclusion that the medieval rule was to make a difference of
20 per cent from margin to margin. Now these matters of
spacing and position are of the greatest importance in the pro-
duction of beautiful books; if they are properly considered
they will make a book printed in quite ordinary type at least
decent and pleasant to the eye. The disregard of them will
spoil the effect of the best designed type.

137

It was only natural that I, a decorator by profession, should
attempt to ornament my books suitably; about this matter I
will only say that I have always tried to keep in mind the
necessity for making my decoration a part of the page of type.
I may add that in designing the magnificent and inimitable
woodcuts which have adorned several of my books, and will
above all adorn the Chaucer which is now drawing near to
completion, my friend Sir Edward Burne-Jones has never lost
sight of this important point, so that his work will not only
give us a series of most beautiful and imaginative pictures, but
form the most harmonious decoration possible to the printed
book.

Kelmscott House,

Upper Mall, Hammersmith,

Nov. 1 1, 1895.

138

A SHORT HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION
OF THE KELMSCOTT PRESS

By S. C. COCKERELL

The foregoing article was written at the request of a London
bookseller for an American client who was about to read a
paper on the Kelmscott Press. As the Press is now closing,
and its seven years' existence will soon be a matter of history, it
seems fitting to set down some other facts concerning it while
they can still be verified ; the more so as statements founded on
imperfect information have appeared from time to time in
newspapers and reviews.

As early as 1866 an edition of The Earthly Paradise was
projected, which was to have been a folio in double columns,
profusely illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and typo-
graphically superior to the books of that time. The designs
for the stories of Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and the Image,
The Ring given to Venus, and The Hill of Venus, were
finished, and forty-four of those for Cupid and Psyche were
engraved on wood in line, somewhat in the manner of the
early German masters. About thirty-five of the blocks were
executed by William Morris himself, and the remainder by
George Y. Wardle, G. F. Campfield, C. J. Faulkner, and Miss
Elizabeth Burden. Specimen pages were set up in Caslon
type, and in the Chiswick Press type afterwards used in The
House of the Wolfings, but for various reasons the project went
no further. Four or five years later there was a plan for an
illustrated edition of Love is Enough^ for which two initial
L's and seven side ornaments were drawn and engraved by
William Morris. Another marginal ornament was engraved
by him from a design by Sir E. Burne-Jones, who also drew
a picture for the frontispiece, which has now been engraved

139

by W. H. Hooper for the final page of the Kelmscott Press
edition of the work. These side ornaments, three of which
appear on the opposite page, are more delicate than any that
were designed for the Kelmscott Press, but they show that
when the Press was started the idea of reviving some of the
decorative features of the earliest printed books had been long
in its founder's mind. At this same period, in the early 'seven-
ties, he was much absorbed in the study of ancient manuscripts
and in writing out and illuminating various books, includ-
ing a Horace and an Omar Khayyam, which may have led his
thoughts away from printing. In any case, the plan of an illus-
trated hove is Enough, like that of the folio Earthly Paradise,
was abandoned.

Although the books written by Morris continued to be
reasonably well printed, it was not until about 1888 that he
again paid much attention to typography. He was then, and
for the rest of his life, when not away from Hammersmith, in
daily communication with his friend and neighbour Emery
Walker, whose views on the subject coincided with his own,
and who had besides a practical knowledge of the technique
of printing. These views were first expressed in an article by
Mr. Walker in the catalogue of the Exhibition of the Arts
and Crafts Exhibition Society, held at the New Gallery in the
autumn of 1 8 8 8 . As a result of many conversations, The House
of the Wolfings was printed at the Chiswick Press at this time,
with a special type modelled on an old Basel fount, unleaded,
and with due regard to proportion in the margins. The title-
page was also carefully arranged. In the following year The
Roots of the Mountains was printed with the same type (except
the lower-case e), but with a differently proportioned page,
and with shoulder-notes instead of headlines. This book was
published in November 1889, and its author declared it to be
the best-looking book issued since the seventeenth century.
Instead of large-paper copies, which had been found unsatis-
factory in the case of The House of the Wolfings, two hundred
and fifty copies were printed on Whatman paper of about the
same size as the paper of the ordinary copies. A small stock of
this paper remained over, and, in order to dispose of it, seventy-
five copies of the translation of the Gunnlaug Saga, which first
appeared in the Fortnightly Review of January 1869, and after-

140

wards in Three Northern Love Stories, were printed at the Chis-
wick Press. The type used was a black-letter copied from one
of Caxton's founts, and the initials were left blank to be rubri-
cated by hand. Three copies were printed on vellum. This
little book was not, however, finished until November 1 8 90.

Meanwhile Morris had resolved to design a special type
of his own. Immediately after The Roots of the Mountains ap-
peared, he set to work upon it, and in December 1889 he
asked Mr. Walker to go into partnership with him as a printer.
This offer was declined by Mr. Walker; but, though not con-
cerned with the financial side of the enterprise, he was virtually
a partner in the Kelmscott Press from its first beginnings to its
end, and no important step was taken without his advice and
approval. Indeed, the original intention was to have the books
set up in Hammersmith and printed at his office in Clifford's
Inn.

It was at this time that Morris began again to collect the
medieval books of which he formed so fine a library in the
next six years. He had made a small collection of such books
years before, but had parted with most of them, to his great
regret. He now bought with the definite purpose of studying
the type and methods of the early printers. Among the first
books so acquired was a copy of Leonard of Arezzo's History
of Florence, printed at Venice by Jacobus Rubeus in 1476, in
a roman type very similar to that of Nicolas Jenson. Parts
of this book and of Jenson's Pliny of 1476 were enlarged by
photography in order to bring out more clearly the character-
istics of the various letters ; and having mastered both their
virtues and their defects, Morris proceeded to design the
fount of type which, in the list of December 1 892, he named
the Golden type, from The Golden Legend, which was to have
been the first book printed with it. This fount consists of
eighty-one designs, including stops, figures, and tied letters.
The lower-case alphabet was finished in a few months. The
first letter having been cut in Great Primer size by Mr. Prince,
was thought too large, and "English" was the size resolved
upon. By the middle of August 1890 eleven punches had
been cut. At the end of the year the fount was all but complete.
On January 12th, 1891, a cottage, No. 16 Upper Mall,
was taken. Mr. William Bowden, a retired master-printer, had

141

already been engaged to act as compositor and pressman.
Enough type was then cast for a trial page, which was set up
and printed on Saturday, January 3 1 st, on a sample of the paper
that was being made for the Press by J. Batchelor and Son.
About a fortnight later ten reams of paper were delivered. On
February 18th a good supply of type followed. Mr. W. H.
Bowden, who subsequently became overseer, then joined his
father as compositor, and the first chapters of The Glittering
Plain were set up. The first sheet appears to have been printed
on March 2nd, when the staff was increased to three by the
addition of a pressman named Giles, who left as soon as this
first book was finished. A friend who saw Morris on the
day after the printing of the page above mentioned recalls his
elation at the success of his new type. The first volume of the
Saga Library, a creditable piece of printing, was brought out
and put beside this trial page, which much more than held its
own. Morris then declared his intention to set to work immedi-
ately on a black-letter fount; illness, however intervened and
it was not begun till June 1 8 9 1 . The lower-case alphabet was
finished by the beginning of August, with the exception of the
tied letters, the designs for which, with those for the capitals,
were sent to Mr. Prince on September 1 1 th. Early in Novem-
ber enough type was cast for two trial pages, the one consisting
of twenty-six lines of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and the other
of sixteen lines of Sigurd the Volsung. In each of these a capital
I is used that was immediately discarded. On the last day of
1 89 1 the full stock of Troy type was despatched from the
foundry. Its first appearance was in a paragraph, announcing
the book from which it took its name, in the list dated May
1892.

This Troy type, which its designer preferred to either of
the others, shows the influence of the beautiful early types of
Peter Schoeffer of Mainz, Gunther Zainer of Augsburg, and
Anthony Koburger of Nuremberg; but, even more than the
Golden type, it has a strong character of its own, which differs
largely from that of any medieval fount. It has recently been
pirated abroad, and is advertised by an enterprising German
firm as "Die amerikanische Triumph-Gothisch." The Golden
type has perhaps fared worse in being remodelled in the United
States, whence, with much of its character lost, it has found its

142

way back to England under the names "Venetian," "Italian,"
and "Jenson." It is strange that no one has yet had the good
sense to have the actual type of Nicholas Jenson reproduced.

The third type used at the Kelmscott Press, called the
"Chaucer," differs from the Troy type only in size, being Pica
instead of Great Primer. It was cut by Mr. Prince between
February and May 1892, and was ready in June. Its first ap-
pearance is in the list of chapters and glossary of The Recuyell
of the Historyes of Troye, which was issued on November 24th,
1892.

On June 2nd of that same year Morris wrote to Mr.
Prince : "I believe in about three months' time I shall be ready
with a new set of sketches for a fount of type on English body."
These sketches were not forthcoming; but on November 5th,
1 892, he bought a copy of Augustinus De Civitate Dei, printed
at the monastery of Subiaco near Rome by Sweynheym and
Pannartz, with a rather compressed type, which appears in
only three known books. He at once designed a lower-case
alphabet on this model, but was not satisfied with it and did not
have it cut. This was his last actual experiment in the design-
ing of type, though he sometimes talked of designing a new
fount, and of having the Golden type cut in a larger size.

Next in importance to the type are the initials, borders and
ornaments designed by William Morris. The first book con-
tains a single recto border and twenty different initials. In the
next book, Poems by the Way, the number of different initials is
fifty-nine. These early initials, many of which were soon dis-
carded, are for the most part suggestive, like the first border,
of the ornament in Italian manuscripts of the fifteenth century.
In Blunt's Love Lyrics there are seven letters of a new alphabet,
with backgrounds of naturalesque grapes and vine leaves, the
result of a visit to Beauvais, where the great porches are carved
with vines, in August 1891. From that time onwards fresh
designs were constantly added, the tendency being always
towards larger foliage and lighter backgrounds, as the early
initials were found to be sometimes too dark for the type. The
total numberof initials of various sizes designed forthe Kelms-
cott Press, including a few that were engraved but never used,
is three hundred and eighty-four. Of the letter T alone there
are no less than thirty-four varieties.

The total number of different borders engraved for the
Press, including one that was not used, but excluding the three
borders designed for The Earthly Paradise by R. Catterson-
Smith, is fifty-seven. The first book to contain a marginal orna-
ment, other than these full borders, was The Defence of Guene-
vere, which has a half-border on p. 74. There are two others
in the preface to The Golden Legend. The Recuyell of the His-
toryes of Troye is the first book in which there is a profusion of
such ornament. One hundred and eight different designs for
marginal ornaments were engraved. Besides the above-named
designs, there are seven frames for the pictures in The Glittering
Plain, one frame for those in a projected edition of The House of
the Wolfings, nineteen frames for the pictures in the Chaucer
(one of which was not used in the book), twenty-eight title-
pages and inscriptions, twenty-six large initial words for the
Chaucer, seven initial words for TheWellatthe World 's End and
The Water of the Wondrous Isles, four line-endings, and three
printer's marks,makinga total of six hundredand forty-four de-
signs by Morris, drawn and engraved within the space of seven
years. All the initials and ornaments that recur were printed
from electrotypes, while most of the titlepages and initial
words were printed direct from the wood. The illustrations by
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane and C. M. Gere were
also, with one or two exceptions, printed from the wood. The
original designs by Burne-Jones were nearly all in pencil and
were re-drawn in ink by R. Catterson-Smith, and in a few cases
by C. Fairfax Murray ; they were then revised by the artist and
transferred to the wood by means of photography. The twelve
designs by A. J. Gaskin for Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, the
map in The Sundering Flood, and the thirty-five reproductions
in Some German Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century, were printed
from process blocks.

All the woodblocks for initials, ornaments, and illustra-
tions were engraved by W. H. Hooper, C. E. Keates and W.
Spielmeyer, except the twenty-three blocks for The Glittering
Plain, which were engraved by A. Leverett, and a few of the
earliest initials, engraved by G. F. Campfield. The whole of
these woodblocks have been sent to the British Museum, and
have been accepted with a condition that they shall not be re-
produced or printed from for the space of a hundred years.

144

The electrotypes have been destroyed. In taking this course,
which was sanctioned by Morris when the matter was talked
of a short while before his death, the aim of the trustees has
been to keep the series of Kelmscott Press books as a thing
apart, and to prevent the designs becoming stale by constant
repetition. Many of them have been stolen and parodied in
America, but in this country they are fortunately copyright.
The type remains in the hands of the trustees, and will be used
for the printing of its designer's works, should special editions
be called for. Other books of which he would have approved
may also be printed with it; the absence of initials and orna-
ment will always distinguish them sufficiently from the books
printed at the Kelmscott Press.

The nature of the English handmade paper used at the
Press has been described by William Morris in the foregoing
article. It was at first supplied in sheets of which the dimen-
sions were sixteen inches by eleven. Each sheet had as a water-
mark a conventional primrose between the initials W. M. As
stated above, The Golden Legend 'was to have been the first book
put in hand, but as only two pages could have been printed at
a time, and this would have made it very costly, paper of double
the size was ordered for this work, and The Story of the Glittering
Plain was begun instead. This book is a small quarto, as are
its five immediate successors, each sheet being folded twice.
The last ream of the smaller size of paper was used on The Order
of Chivalry. All the other volumes of that series are printed in
octavo, on paper of the double size. For the Chaucer a stouter
and slightly larger paper was needed. This has for its water-
mark a perch with a spray in its mouth. Many of the large
quarto books were printed on this paper, of which the first two
reams were delivered in February 1893. Only one other size
of paper was used at the Kelmscott Press. The watermark of
this is an apple, with the initials W. M., as in the other two
watermarks. The books printed on this paper are The Earthly
Paradise, The Floure and the Leafe, The Shepheardes Calender,
and Sigurd the Volsung. The last named is a folio, and the open
book shows the size of the sheet, which is about eighteen inches
by thirteen. The first supply of this Apple paper was delivered
on March 15, 1895.

Except in the case of Blunt's hove Lyrics, The Nature of

145 L

Gothic, Biblia Innocentium, The Golden Legend, and The Book of
Wisdom and Lies, a few copies of all the books were printed on
vellum. The six copies of The Glittering Plain were printed on
very fine vellum, obtained from Rome, of which it was impos-
sible to get a second supply as it was all required by the Vatican.
The vellum for the other books, except for two or three copies
of Poems by the Way, which were on the Roman vellum, was
supplied by H. Band of Brentford, and by W. J. Turney and
Co. of Stourbridge. There are three complete vellum sets in
existence, and the extreme difficulty of completing a set after
the copies are scattered makes it unlikely that there will ever
be a fourth.

The black ink which proved most satisfactory, after that of
more than one English firm was tried, was obtained from Han-
over. Morris often spoke of making his own ink, in order
to be certain of the ingredients, but his intention was never
carried out.

The binding of the books in vellum and in half holland was
from the first done by J. and J. Leighton. Most of the vellum
used was white, or nearly so, but Morris himself much pre-
ferred it dark, and the skins showing brown hair-marks were
reserved for the binding of his own copies of the books. The
silk ties of four colours, red, blue, yellow, and green, were
specially woven and dyed.

In the following section fifty-two works, in sixty-six vol-
umes, are described as having been printed at the Kelmscott
Press, besides the two pages of Froissart's Chronicles. It is
scarcely necessary to add that only hand presses have been used,
of the type known as "Albion." In the early days there was only
one press on which the books were printed,besides a small press
for taking proofs. At the end of May 1891 larger premises
were taken at 1 4 Upper Mall, next door to the cottage already
referred to, which was given up in June. In November 1 89 1
a second press was bought, as The Golden Legend was not yet
half finished, and it seemed as though the last of its 1286 pages
would never be reached. Three years later another small house
was taken, No. 1 1 Upper Mall, overlooking the river, which
acted as a reflector, so there was an excellent light for printing.
In January 1895 a third press, specially made for the work,
was set up here in order that two presses might be employed

146

on the Chaucer. This press has already passed into other hands,
and the little house, with its many associations, and its pleasant
outlook towards Chiswick and Mortlake, is now being trans-
formed into a granary. The last sheet printed there was that
on which are the frontispiece and title of this book.

14 Upper Mall, Hammersmith,
January 4, 1898.

AN ANNOTATED LIST OF ALL THE BOOKS
PRINTED AT THE KELMSCOTT PRESS IN
THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY WERE
ISSUED.

Note. — The borders are numbered as far as possible in the
order of their first appearance, those which appear on a verso
or left-hand page being distinguished by the addition of the
letter "a" to the numbers of the recto borders of similar design.

i. The Story of the Glittering Plain. Which has been

ALSO CALLED THE LAND OF LlVING Men OR THE ACRE OF THE

Undying. Written by William Morris. Small 4to. Golden
type. Border i. 200 paper copies at two guineas and 6 on
vellum. Dated April 4, issued May 8, 1 89 1. Sold by Reeves
and Turner. Bound in stiff vellum with washleather ties.

This book was set up from Nos. 81-4 of the English Illus-
tratedMagazine ', in which it first appeared ; some of the chapter
headings were re-arranged, and a few small corrections were
made in the text. A trial page, the first printed at the Press,
was struck off on January 31, 1 8 9 1 , but the first sheet was not
printed until about a month later. The border was designed in
January of the same year, and engraved by W. H. Hooper.
Morris had four of the vellum copies bound in green vellum,
three of which he gave to friends. Only two copies on vellum
were sold, at twelve and fifteen guineas. This was the only
book with washleather ties. All the other vellum-bound books
have silk ties, except Shelley's Poems and Hand and Soul, which
have no ties.

2. Poems by the Way. Written by William Morris. Small
4to. Golden type. In black and red. Border 1. 300 paper

148

copies at two guineas, 1 3 on vellum at about twelve guineas.
Dated Sept. 24, issued Oct. 20, 1891. Sold by Reeves and
Turner. Bound in stiffvellum.

This was the first book printed at the Kelmscott Press in
two colours, and the first book in which the smaller printer's
mark appeared. After The Glittering Plain was finished, at the
beginning of April, no printing was done until May 11. In
the meanwhile the compositors were busy setting up the early
sheets of The Golden Legend. The printing of Poems by the
Way, which its author first thought of calling Flores Atramenti,
was not begun until July. The poems in it were written at
various times. In the manuscript, Hajbur and Signy is dated
February 4, 1870; Hildebrand and Hillilel, March 1, 1 87 1 ;
and Love's Reward, Kelmscott, April 21, 1871. Meeting in
Winter is a song from The Story of Orpheus, an unpublished
poem intended for The Earthly Paradise. The last poem in the
book, Goldilocks and Goldilocks, was written on May 20, 1 89 1,
for the purpose of adding to the bulk of the volume, which was
then being prepared. A few of the vellum covers were stained
at Mertonred, yellow, indigo, and dark green, but the experi-
ment was not successful.

3. The Love-Lyrics & Songs of Proteus by Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt with the Love-Sonnets of Proteus by
the same Author now reprinted in their Full Text
with many Sonnets omitted from the Earlier Editions.
London mdcccxcii. Small 4to. Golden type. In black and
red. Border 1. 300 paper copies at two guineas, none on
vellum. Dated Jan. 26, issued Feb. 27, 1892. SoldbyReeves
and Turner. Bound in stiffvellum.

This is the only book in which the initials are printed in red.
This was done by the author's wish.

4. The Nature of Gothic a Chapter of the Stones of
Venice. ByJohnRuskin. With a preface by WilliamMorris.
Small 4to. Golden type. Border 1. Diagrams in text. 500
paper copies at thirty shillings, none on vellum. Dated in
preface February 15, issued March 22, 1892. Published by
George Allen. Bound in stiffvellum.

This chapter of The Stones of Venice, which Ruskin always
considered the most important in the book, was first printed

149

separately in 1 8 54 as a sixpenny pamphlet. Morris paid more
than one tribute to it in Hopes and Fears for Art. Of him Ruskin
said in 1887 to the writer of these notes, "Morris is beaten
gold."

5. The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems. By
William Morris. Small 4to. Golden type. In black and
red. Borders 2, and 1 . 300 paper copies at two guineas, 10 on
vellum at about twelve guineas. Dated April 2, issued May 1 9,
1892. Sold by Reeves and Turner. Bound in limp vellum.

This book was set up from a copy of the edition published
by Reeves and Turner in 1889, the only alteration, except a
few corrections, being in the 1 1 th line of Summer Dawn. It is
divided into three parts, the poems suggested by Malory's
Morte Darthur, the poems inspired by Froissart's Chronicles,
and poems on various subjects. The first two sections have
borders, and the last has a half-border. The first sheet was
printed on February 1 7, 1 892. It was the first book bound in
limp vellum, and the only one of which the title was inscribed
by hand on the back.

6. A Dream of John Ball and a King's Lesson, by
William Morris. Small 4to. Golden type. In black and
red. Borders 3a, 4, and 2. With a woodcut designed by Sir
E. Burne-Jones. 300 paper copies at thirty shillings, 1 1 on
vellum at ten guineas. Dated May 13, issued Sept. 24, 1892.
Sold by Reeves and Turner. Bound in limp vellum.

This was set up with a few alterations from a copy of Reeves
and Turner's third edition, and the printing was begun on
April 4, 1892. The frontispiece was redrawn from that to the
first edition, and engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper, who
engraved all Burne-Jones's designs for the Kelmscott Press,
except those for the Life and Death of Jason. The inscription
below the figures, and the narrow border, were designed by
Morris, and engraved with the picture on one block, which was
afterwards used on a leaflet printed for the Ancoats Brother-
hood in February 1 894.

7. The Golden Legend. By Jacobus de Voragine. Trans-
lated by William Caxton. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 3 vols. Large
4to. Golden type. Borders 5a, 5, 6a, and 7. Woodcut title and

150

two woodcuts designed by Sir E. Burne-Jones. 500 paper
copies at five guineas, none on vellum. Dated Sept. 1 2, issued
Nov. 3, 1 892. Published by Bernard Quaritch. Bound in half
holland, with paper labels printed in the Troy type.

In July 1 890, when only a few letters of the Golden type
had been cut, Morris bought a copy of this book, printed
by Wynkyn de Worde in 1527. He soon afterwards deter-
mined to print it, and on Sept. 1 1 entered into a formal agree-
ment with Quaritch for its publication. It was only an un-
foreseen difficulty about the size of the first stock of paper
that led to The Golden Legend not being the first book put in
hand. It was set up from a transcript of Caxton's first edition,
lent by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library for
the purpose. A trial page was got out in March 1 8 9 1 , and 50
pages were in type by May 1 1, the day on which the first sheet
was printed. The first volume was finished, with the excep-
tion of the illustrations and the preliminary matter, in Oct.
1 89 1 . The two illustrations and the title (which was the first
woodcut title designed by Morris) were not engraved until
June and August 1892, when the third volume was approach-
ing completion. About half a dozen impressions of the illus-
trations were pulled on vellum. A slip asking owners of the
book not to have it bound with pressure, nor to have the edges
cut instead of merely trimmed, was inserted in each copy.

8. The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. By Raoul
Lefevre. Translated by William Caxton. Edited byH. Halli-
day Sparling. 2 vols. Large 4to. Troy type, with table of
chapters and glossary in Chaucer type. In black and red.
Borders 5a, 5, and 8. Woodcut title. 300 paper copies at nine
guineas, 5 on vellum at eighty pounds. Published by Bernard
Quaritch. Bound in limp vellum.

This book, begun in February 1892, is the first book
printed in Troy type, and the first in which Chaucer type ap-
pears. It is a reprint of the first book printed in English. It
had long been a favourite with Morris, who designed a great
quantity of new initials and ornaments for it, and wrote the
following note for Quaritch 's catalogue: "As to the matter of
the book, it makes a thoroughly amusing story, instinct with
medieval thought and manners. For though written at the end

of the Middle Ages and dealing with classical mythology, it has
in it no token of the coming Renaissance, but is purely medi-
eval. It is the last issue of that story of Troy which through the
whole of the Middle Ages had such a hold on men's imagina-
tions ; the story built up from a rumour of the Cyclic Poets, of
the heroic City of Troy, defended byPriam and his gallant sons,
led by Hector the Preux Chevalier, and beset by the violent and
brutal Greeks, who were looked on as the necessary machinery
for bringing about the undeniable tragedy of the fall of the
city. Surely this is well worth reading, if only as a piece of un-
diluted medievalism." 2000 copies of a 4to announcement,
with specimen pages, were printed at the Kelmscott Press in
December 1892, for distribution by the publisher.

9. BlBLIA INNOCENTIUM : BEING THE STORY OF God's CHOSEN

People before the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ upon
Earth, written anew for Children by J. W. Mackail,
sometime Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. 8vo. Border
2. 200 on paper at a guinea, none on vellum. Dated Oct. 22,
issued Dec. 9, 1892. Sold by Reeves and Turner. Bound in
stiff vellum.

This was the last book issued in stiff vellum except Hand
and Soul, and the last with untrimmed edges. It was the first
book printed in 8vo.

10. The History of Reynard the Foxe by William Cax-
ton. Reprinted from his edition of 148 1. Edited by H.
Halliday Sparling. Large 4to. Troy type, with glossary in
Chaucer type. In black and red. Borders 5a and 7. Woodcut
title. 300 on paper at three guineas, 10 on vellum at fifteen
guineas. Dated Dec. 15, 1892, issued Jan. 25, 1893. Pub-
lished by Bernard Quaritch. Bound in limp vellum.

About this book, which was first announced as in the press
in the list dated July 1892, Morris wrote the following note
for Quaritch's catalogue: "This translation of Caxton's is
one of the very best of his works as to style; and being trans-
lated from a kindred tongue is delightful as mere language.
In its rude joviality, and simple and direct delineation of char-
acter, it is a thoroughly good representative of the famous
Beast Epic." The edges of this book, and of all subsequent
books, were trimmed in accordance with the invariable practice

152

of the early printers. Mr. Morris much preferred the trimmed
edges.

ii. The Poems of William Shakespeare, printed after
the Original Copies of Venus and Adonis, 1593. The
RapeofLucrece, 1594. Sonnets, 1609. The Lover's Com-
plaint. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo. Golden type. In black
and red. Borders 1 and 2. 500 paper copies at twenty-five
shillings, 10 on vellum at ten guineas. Dated Jan. 17, issued
Feb. 13, 1893. Sold by Reeves and Turner. Bound in limp
vellum.

A trial page of this book was set up on Nov. 1, 1892.
Though the number was large, this has become one of the
rarest books issued from the Press.

12. News from Nowhere: or, an Epoch of Rest, being
some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, By William
Morris. 8vo. Golden type. In black and red. Borders 9a
and 4, and a woodcut engraved by W. H. Hooper from a
design by C. M. Gere. 300 on paper at two guineas, 10 on
vellum at ten guineas. Dated Nov. 22, 1892, issued March
24,1893. Sold by Reeves and Turner. Bound in limp vellum.

The text of this book was printed before Shakespeare s
Poems and Sonnets, but it was kept back for the frontispiece,
which is a picture of the old manor-house in the village of
Kelmscott by the upper Thames, from which the Press took its
name. It was set up from a copy of one of Reeves and Turner's
editions, and in reading it for the press the author made a few
slight corrections. It was the last book except the Savonarola
(No. 31) in which he used the old paragraph mark C, which
was discarded in favour of the leaves which had already been
used in the two large 4to books printed in the Troy type.

13. The Order of Chivalry. Translated from the French
by William Caxton and reprinted from his edition of 1484.
Edited by F. S. Ellis. And L'Ordene de Chevalerie, with
Translation by William Morris. Small 4to. Chaucer type.
In black and red. Borders 9a and 4, and a woodcut designed
by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. 225 on paper at thirty shillings,
10 on vellum at ten guineas. The Order of Chivalry dated

*53

Nov. 10, 1892, UOrdene de Chevalerie dated February 24,
1893, issued April 12, 1893. Sold by Reeves and Turner.
Bound in limp vellum.

This was the last book printed in small 4to. The last sec-
tion is in 8vo. It was the first book printed in Chaucer type.
The reprint from Caxton was finished while News from No-
where was in the press, and before Shakespeare's Poems and
Sonnets was begun. The French poem and its translation were
added as an after-thought, and have a separate colophon. Some
of the three-line initials, which were designed for The Well
at the World's End, are used in the French poem, and this is
their first appearance. The translation was begun on Dec. 3,
1 892, and the border round the frontispiece was designed on
Feb. 13, 1893.

14. The Life of Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal Archbishop
of York. Written by George Cavendish. Edited by F. S.
Ellis from the author's autograph MS. 8vo. Golden type.
Border 1. 250 on paper at two guineas, 6 on vellum at ten
guineas. Dated March 30, issued May 3, 1893. Sold by
Reeves and Turner. Bound in limp vellum.

1 5. The History of Godefrey of Boloyne and of the Con-
quest of Iherusalem. Reprinted from Caxton's edition of
148 1. Edited by H.Halliday Sparling. Large 4to. Troy type,
with list of chapter headings and glossary in Chaucer type. In
black and red. Borders 5a and 6, and woodcut title. 300 on
paper at six guineas, 6 on vellum at twenty guineas. Dated
April 27, issued May 24, 1893. Published by William
Morris at the Kelmscott Press. Bound in limp vellum.

This was the fifth and last of the Caxton reprints, with many
new ornaments and initials, and a new printer's mark. It was
first announced as in the press in the list dated Dec. 1892.
It was the first book published and sold at the Kelmscott Press.
An announcement and order form, with two different speci-
men pages, was printed at the Press, besides a special invoice.
A few copies were bound in half holland, not for sale.

16. Utopia, written by Sir Thomas More. A reprint of
the second edition of Ralph Robinson's translation, with a
foreword by William Morris. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo.

154

Chaucer type, with the reprinted title in Troy type. In black
and red. Borders 4 and 2. 300 on paper at thirty shillings, 8 on
vellum at ten guineas. Dated August 4, issued September 8,
1893. Sold by Reeves and Turner. Bound in limp vellum.

This book was first announced as in the press in the list
dated May 20, 1893.

17. Maud, a Monodrama, by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
8vo. Golden type. In black and red. Borders 10a and 10, and
woodcut title. 500 on paper at two guineas, 5 on vellum not
forsale. Dated Aug. 1 1, issued Sept. 30, 1893. Publishedby
Macmillan and Co. Bound in limp vellum.

The borders were specially designed for this book. They
were both used again in the Keats, and one of them appears in
The Sundering Flood. It is the first of the 8vo books with a
woodcut title.

18. Gothic Architecture: a Lecture for the Arts and
Crafts Exhibition Society. By William Morris. i6mo.
Golden type. In black and red. 1500 on paper at two shillings
and sixpence, 45 on vellum at ten and fifteen shillings. Bound
inhalfholland.

This lecture was set up at Hammersmith and printed at
the New Gallery during the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in
October and November 1893. The first copies were ready on
October 21, and the book was twice reprinted before the
Exhibition closed. It was the first book printed in i6mo.
The four-line initials used in it appear here for the first time.
The vellum copies were sold during the Exhibition at ten
shillings, and the price was subsequently raised to fifteen
shillings.

19. Sidonia the Sorceress. By William Meinhold.
Translated by Francesca Speranza Lady Wilde. Large
4to. Golden type. In black and red. Border 8. 300 paper
copies at four guineas, 10 on vellum at twenty guineas. Dated
Sept. 15, issued November 1, 1893. Published by William
Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

Before the publication of this book a large 4to announce-
ment and order form was issued, with a specimen page, and an
interesting description of the book and its author, written and

l55

signed by Morris. Some copies were bound in half holland,
not for sale.

20. Ballads and Narrative Poems by Dante Gabriel Ros-
setti. 8vo. Golden type. In black and red. Borders 4a and
4. 310 on paper at two guineas, 6 on vellum at ten guineas.
Dated Oct. 14, issued in November 1893. Published by Ellis
andElvey. Bound in limp vellum.

This book was announced as in preparation in the list of
August 1, 1893.

2 1 . The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane. Trans-
lated by William Morris from the French of the 1 3th century.
i6mo. Chaucer type. In black and red. Borders 1 ia and 1 1,
and woodcut title. 350 on paper at seven shillings and six-
pence, 1 5 on vellum at thirty shillings. Dated Dec. 1 6, issued
Dec. 28, 1893. Published by William Morris. Bound in half
holland.

This story, like the three other translations with which it
is uniform, was taken from a little volume called Nouvelles
Francoises en prose du XIII e Steele, Paris, Jannet, 1856. They
were first announced as in preparation under the heading
" French Tales " in the list dated May 20, 1893. Eighty-five
copies of King Florus were bought by J. and M. L. Tregaskis,
who had them bound in all parts of the world. These are now
in the Rylands Library at Manchester.

22. The Story of the Glittering Plain which has been
also called the land of llving men or the acre of the
Undying. Written by William Morris. Large 4to. Troy
type, with list of chapters in Chaucer type. In black and red.
Borders 12a and 12, 23 designs by Walter Crane, engraved
by A. Leverett, and a woodcut title. 250 on paper at five
guineas, 7 on vellum at twenty pounds. Dated Jan. 1 3, issued
Feb. 17,1894. Published by William Morris. Bound in limp
vellum.

Neither the borders in this book nor six out of the seven
frames round the illustrations appear in any other book. The
seventh is used round the second picture in Love is Enough.
A few copies were bound in half holland.

156

23. Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile. Done out of the
ancient French by William Morris. i6mo. Chaucer type. In
black and red. Borders 1 ia and 1 1, and woodcut title. 500 on
paper at seven shillings and sixpence, 1 5 on vellum at thirty
shillings. Dated March 13, issued April 4, 1894. Published
by William Morris. Bound in half holland.

A poem entitled "Amys and Amillion," founded on this
story, was originally to have appeared in the second volume of
The Earthly Paradise, but, like some other poems announced
at the same time, it was not included in the book.

20a. Sonnets and Lyrical Poems by Dante Gabriel Ros-
setti. 8vo. Golden type. In black and red. Borders 1 a and
1 , and woodcut title. 3 1 o on paper at two guineas, 6 on vellum
at ten guineas. Dated Feb. 20, issued April 21, 1894. Pub-
lished by Ellis and Elvey. Bound in limp vellum.

This book is uniform with No. 20, to which it forms
a sequel. Both volumes were read for the press by W. M.
Rossetti.

24. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo.
Golden type. In black and red. Borders 10a and 10, and
woodcut title. 300 on paper at thirty shillings, 7 on vellum at
nine guineas. Dated March 7, issued May 8, 1894. Pub-
lished by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

This is now (Jan. 1898) the most sought after of all the
smaller Kelmscott Press books. It was announced as in pre-
paration in the lists of May 27 and August 1, 1893, and as in
the press in that of March 31, 1894, when the woodcut title
still remained to be printed.

25. Atalanta in Calydon: A Tragedy. By Algernon
Charles Swinburne. Large 4to. Troy type, with argument
and dramatis personae in Chaucer type; the dedication and
quotation from Euripides in Greek type designed by Selwyn
Image. In black and red. Borders 5a and 5, and woodcut
title. 250 on paper at two guineas, 8 on vellum at twelve
guineas. Dated May 4, issued July 24, 1894. Published by
William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

In the vellum copies of this book the colophon is not on the
8 2nd page as in the paper copies, but on the following page.

r57

26. The Tale of the Emperor Coustans and of Over Sea.
Done out of the ancient French by William Morris. i6mo.
Chaucer type. In black and red. Borders na and II, both
twice, and two woodcut titles. 52 5 on paper at seven shillings
and sixpence, 20 on vellum at two guineas. Dated August 30,
issued Sept. 26, 1 894. Published by William Morris. Bound
in half holland.

The first of these stories, which was the source of " The
Man born to be King" in The Earthly Paradise, was announced
as in preparation in the list of March 31, 1894.

27. The Wood beyond the World. By William Morris.
8vo. Chaucer type. In black and red. Borders 13a and 13,
and a frontispiece designed by Sir E. Burne-Jones, and en-
graved on wood by W. Spielmeyer. 350 on paper at two
guineas. Dated May 30, issued Oct. 16, 1894. Published by
William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

The borders in this book, as well as the ten half-borders,
are here used for the first time. It was first announced as in
the press in the list of March 31, 1894. Another edition was
published by Lawrence and Bullen in 1895.

28. The Book of Wisdom and Lies. A book of traditional
stories from Georgia in Asia. Translated by Oliver Wardrop
from the original of Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani. 8vo. Golden
type. In black and red. Borders 4a and 4, and woodcut title.
250 on paper at two guineas, none on vellum. Finished Sept.

29. issued Oct. 29, 1894. Published by Bernard Quaritch.
Bound in limp vellum.

The arms of Georgia, consisting of the Holy Coat, appear
in the woodcut title of this book.

29. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol-
ume 1. Edited byF. S. Ellis. 8vo. Golden type. Borders ia
and 1, and woodcut title. 250 on paper at twenty-five shil-
lings, 6 on vellum at eight guineas. Not dated, issued Nov.
29, 1894. Published by William Morris. Bound in limp
vellum without ties.

Red ink is not used in this volume, though it is used in the
second volume, and more sparingly in the third. Some of the
half-borders designed for The Wood beyond the World reappear

158

before the longer poems. The Shelley was first announced as
in the press in the list of March 31,1894.

30. Psalmi Penitentiales. An English rhymed version of
the Seven Penitential Psalms. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo.
Chaucer type. In black and red. 300 on paper at seven shil-
lings and sixpence, 1 2 on vellum at three guineas. Dated Nov.
15, issued Dec. 10, 1894. Published by William Morris.
Bound in half holland.

These verses were taken from a manuscript Book of Hours
written at Gloucester in the first half of the 15th century, but
the Rev. Professor Skeat has pointed out that the scribe must
have copied them from an older manuscript, as they are in the
Kentish dialect of about a century earlier. The half-border on
p. 34 appears for the first time in this book.

31. Epistola de Contemptu Mundi di Frate Hieronymo
da Ferrara dellordine de Frati Predicatori la quale

MANDA AD ELENA BuONACCORSI SUA MaDRE, PER CONSO-

larla della Morte del Fratello, suo Zio. Edited by
Charles Fairfax Murray from the original autograph letter.
8vo. Chaucer type. In black and red. Border 1. Woodcut
on title designed by C. F. Murray and engraved by W. H.
Hooper. 150 on paper, and 6 on vellum. Dated Nov. 30,
ready Dec. 12,18 94. Bound in half holland.

This little book was printed for Mr. C. Fairfax Murray,
the owner of the manuscript, and was not for sale in the
ordinary way. The colophon is in Italian, and the printer's
mark is in red.

32. The Tale of Beowulf. Done out of the old English
tongue by William Morris and A. J. Wyatt. Large 4to. Troy
type, with argument, side-notes, list of persons and places,
and glossary in Chaucer type. In black and red. Borders 14a
and 14, and woodcut title. 300 on paper at two guineas, 8 on
vellum at ten pounds. Dated Jan. 10, issued Feb. 2, 1895.
Published by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

The borders in this book were only used once again, in the
Jason. A Note to the Reader printed on a slip in the Golden
type was inserted in each copy. Beowulf was first announced

l59

as in preparation in the list of May 20, 1893. The verse trans-
lation was begun by Morris, with the aid of Mr. Wyatt's care-
ful paraphrase of the text, on Feb. 21, 1893, and finished on
April 10, 1 894, but the argument was not written by Morris
until Dec. 10, 1894.

22' Syr Perecyvelle of Gales. Overseen by F. S. Ellis,
after the edition edited by J. O. Halliwell from the Thornton
MS. in the Library of Lincoln Cathedral. 8vo. Chaucer type.
In black and red. Borders 13a and 13, and a woodcut de-
signed by Sir E. Burne-Jones. 3 50 on paper at fifteen shillings,
8 on vellum at four guineas. Dated Feb. 16, issued May 2,
1895. Published by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.
This is the first of the series to which Sire Degrevaunt and
Syr Isumbrace belong. They were all reprinted from the
Camden Society's volume of 1 844, which was a favourite with
Morris from his Oxford days. Syr Perecyvelle was first an-
nounced in the list of Dec. 1, 1 894. The shoulder-notes were
added by Morris.

34. The Life and Death of Jason, a Poem. By William
Morris. Large 4to. Troy type, with a few words in Chaucer
type. In black and red. Borders 14a and 14, and two wood-
cuts designed by Sir E. Burne-Jones and engraved on wood
by W. Spielmeyer. 200 on paper at five guineas, 6 on vellum
at twenty guineas. Dated May 25, issued July 5, 1895. Pub-
lished by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

This book, announced as in the press in the list of April 2 1 ,
1 8 94, proceeded slowly, as several other books, notably the
Chaucer^ were being printed at the same time. The text,
which had been corrected for the second edition of 1 868, and
for the edition of 1 882, was again revised by the author. The
line-fillings on the last page were cut on metal for this book,
and cast like type.

29a. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol-
ume II. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo. Golden type. In black
and red. 250 on paper at twenty-five shillings, 6 on vellum at
eightguineas. Not dated, issued March 25, 1895. Published
by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum without ties.

160

35- Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair. By
William Morris, 2 vols. i6mo. Chaucer type. In black
and red. Borders 15a and 15, and woodcut title. 600 on paper
at fifteen shillings, 12 on vellum at four guineas. Dated July
25, issued Sept. 25, 1895. Published by William Morris.
Bound in half holland with labels printed in the Golden type.

The borders designed for this book were only used once
again, in Hand and Soul. The plot of the story was suggested
by that of Havelok the Dane, printed by the Early English
Text Society.

29b. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Volume III. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo. Golden type. In
black and red. 250 on paper at twenty-five shillings, 6 on
vellum at eight guineas. Dated August 21, issued October
28, 1895. Published by William Morris. Bound in limp
vellum without ties.

36. Hand and Soul. By Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Re-
printed from the Germ for Messrs. Way and Williams, of
Chicago. i6mo. Golden type. In black and red. Borders 15a
and 15, and woodcut title. 300 paper copies and 1 1 vellum
copies for America. 225 paper copies for sale in England at
ten shillings, and 10 on vellum at thirty shillings. Dated Oct.
24, issued Dec. 12, 1895. Bound in stiff vellum without ties.

This was the only 1 6mo book in vellum. The English and
American copies have a slightly different colophon. The
shoulder-notes were added by Morris.

37. Poems chosen out of the Works of Robert Herrick.
Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo. Golden type. In black and red.
Borders 4a and 4, and woodcut title. 250 on paper at thirty
shillings, 8 on vellum at eight guineas. Dated Nov. 21, 1895,
issued Feb. 6, 1896. Published by William Morris. Bound
in limp vellum.

This book was first announced as in preparation in the list
of Dec. 1,18 94, and as in the press in that of July 1 , 1895.

38. Poems chosen out of the Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo. Golden type. In
black and red. Borders 1 3a and 13. 300 on paper at a guinea,

161 m

8 on vellum at five guineas. Dated Feb. 5, issued April 12,
1896. Published by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.
This book contains thirteen poems. It was first announced
as in preparation in the list of Dec. 1, 1 894, and as in the press
in that of Nov. 26, 1895. It is the last of the series to which
Tennyson's Maud, and the poems of Rossetti, Keats, Shelley,
and Herrick belong.

39. The Well at the World's End. By William Morris.
Large 4-to. Double columns. Chaucer type. In black and red.
Borders 16a, 16, 17a, 17, 18a, 18, 19a and 19, and 4 wood-
cuts designed by Sir E. Burne-Jones. 350 on paper at five
guineas, 8 on vellum at twenty guineas. Dated March 2,
issued June 4, 1896. Sold by William Morris. Bound in limp
vellum.

This book, delayed for various reasons, was longer on hand
than any other. It appears in no less than twelve lists, from
that of Dec. 1892, to that of Nov. 26, 1895, as "in the press."
Trial pages, including one in a single column, were ready as
early as September 1892, and the printing began on Dec. 16
of that year. The edition of The Well at the World's End pub-
lished by Longmans was then being printed from the author's
manuscript at the Chiswick Press, and the Kelmscott Press
edition was set up from the sheets of that edition, which, though
not issued until October 1896, was finished in 1894. The
eight borders and the six different ornaments between the
columns appear here for the first time, but are used again in
The Water of the Wondrous Isles, with the exception of two
borders.

40. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Edited by F. S.
Ellis. Folio. Chaucer type, with headings to the longer poems
in Troy type. In black and red. Borders 20a to 26, woodcut
title, and eighty-seven illustrations designed by Sir E. Burne-
Jones. 425 on paper at twenty pounds, 13 on vellum at 120
guineas. Dated May 8, issued June 26, 1896. Published by
William Morris. Bound in half holland.

The history of this book, which is by far the most important
achievement of the Kelmscott Press, is as follows. As far back
as June II, 1891, Morris spoke of printing a Chaucer with
a black-letter fount which he hoped to design. Four months

162

later, when most of the Troy type was designed and cut, he
expressed his intention to use it first on John Ball, and then
on a Chaucer and perhaps a Gesta Romanorum. By January i,
1892, the Troy type was delivered, and early in that month
two trial pages, one from The Cook's Tale and one from Sir
Thopas, the latter in double columns, were got out. It then
became evident that the type was too large for a Chaucer, and
Morris decided to have it re-cut in the size known as pica. By
the end of June he was thus in possession of the type which in
the list issued in December 1 8 92, he named the Chaucer type.
In July 1892, another trial page, a passage from The Knight's
Tale in double columns of 58 lines, was got out, and found to
be satisfactory. The idea of the Chaucer 'as it now exists, with
illustrations by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, then took definite
shape.

In a proof of the first list, dated April 1892, there is an
announcement of the book as in preparation, in black-letter,
large quarto, but this was struck out, and does not appear in
the list as printed in May, nor yet in the July list. In that for
Dec. 1892, it is announced for the first time as to be in Chaucer
type "with about sixty designs by E. Burne-Jones." The next
list, dated March 9, 1893, states that it will be a folio, and that
it is in the press, by which was meant that a few pages were in
type. I n the list dated Aug. 1,1893, tne probable price is given
as twenty pounds. The next four lists contain no fresh infor-
mation, but on Aug. 17, 1 894, nine days after the first sheet
was printed, a notice was sent to the trade that there would
be 325 copies at twenty pounds and about sixty woodcuts
designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Three months later it
was decided to increase the number of illustrations to upwards
of seventy, and to print another 100 copies of the book. A
circular letter was sent to subscribers on Nov. 14, stating this
and giving them an opportunity of cancelling their orders.
Orders were not withdrawn, the extra copies were immediately
taken up, and the list for Dec. 1, 1 894, which is the first con-
taining full particulars, announces that all paper copies are
sold.

Morris began designing his first folio border on Feb.
1, 1893, but was dissatisfied with the design and did not
finish it. Three days later he began the vine border for the

163 m 2

first page, and finished it in about a week, together with the
initial word "Whan," the two lines of heading, and the frame
for the first picture, and W. H. Hooper engraved the whole of
these on one block. The first picture was engraved at about
the same time. A specimen of the first page (differing slightly
from the same page as it appears in the book) was shown at the
Arts and Crafts Exhibition in October and November 1893,
and was issued to a few leading booksellers, but it was not until
August 8, 1 894, that the first sheet was printed at 14 Upper
Mall. On Jan. 8, 1895, another press was started at 2 1 Upper
Mall, and from that time two presses were almost exclusively
at work on the Chaucer. By Sept. 10 the last page of The
Romaunt of the Rose was printed. In the middle of Feb. 1896
Morris began designing the title. It was finished on the
27th of the same month, and engraved by Hooper in March.
On May 8, a year and nine months after the printing of the
first sheet, the book was completed. On June 2 the first two
copies were delivered to its producers, Burne- Jones and
Morris. Morris's copy is now at Exeter College, Oxford,
with other books printed at the Kelmscott Press.

Besides the eighty-seven woodcut illustrations designed
by Burne-Jones, and engraved by Hooper, the Chaucer con-
tains a woodcut title, fourteen large borders, eighteen differ-
ent frames round the illustrations, and twenty-six large initial
words designed for the book by William Morris. Many of
these were engraved by C. E. Keates, and others by W. H.
Hooper and W. Spielmeyer.

In Feb. 1896 a notice was issued respecting special
bindings, of which Morris intended to design four. Two of
these were to be executed under T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's
direction at the Doves Bindery, and two by J. and J. Leighton.
But the only design that he was able to complete was for a
full white pigskin binding, which has now been carried out
at the Doves Bindery on forty-eight copies, including two on
vellum.

41. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume I. Prologue: The Wanderers. March: Atalanta's
Race. The Man born to be King. Medium 4to. Golden
type. In black and red. Borders 27a, 27, 28a, and 28, and

164

woodcut title. 225 on paper at thirty shillings, 6 on vellum
at seven guineas. Dated May 7, issued July 24, 1896. Pub-
lished by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

This was the first book printed on the paper with the apple
water-mark. The seven other volumes followed it at intervals
of a few months. None of the ten borders used in The Earthly
Paradise appear in any other book. The four different half-
borders round the poems to the months are also not used else-
where. The first border was designed in June 1895.

42. Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis. Latin poems taken
from a Psalter written in England about a.d. 1220. Edited
by S. C. Cockerell. Large 4to. Troy type. In black, red and
blue. 250 on paper at ten shillings, 10 on vellum at two
guineas. Dated July 7, issued August 7, 1896. Published by
William Morris. Bound in half holland.

This was the first book printed at the Kelmscott Press in
three colours. The manuscript from which the poems were
taken was one of the most beautiful of the English books in
Morris's possession, both as regards writing and ornament.
No author's name is given to the poems, but after this book
was issued the Rev. E. S. Dewick pointed out that they had
already been printed at Tegernsee in 1 579, in a 1 6mo volume
in which they are ascribed to Stephen Langton. A note to
this effect was printed in the Chaucer type in Dec. 28, 1896,
and distributed to the subscribers.

41a. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume II. April: The Doom of King Acrisius. The Proud
King. Medium 4to. Golden type. In black and red. Borders
29a, 29, 28a, and 28. 225 on paper at thirty shillings, 6 on
vellum at seven guineas. Dated June 24, issued Sept. 17,
1896. Published by William Morris. Bound in limp vellum.

43. The Floure and the Leafe, and the Boke of Cupide,
God of Love, or The Cuckow and the Nightingale.
Edited by F. S. Ellis. Medium 4to. Troy type, with a note
and colophon in Chaucer type. In black and red. 300 on
paper at ten shillings, 10 on vellum at two guineas. Dated
Aug. 21, issued Nov. 2, 1896. Published at the Kelmscott
Press. Bound in half holland.

165

Two of the initial words from the Chaucer are used in this
book, one at the beginning of each poem. These poems were
formerly attributed to Chaucer, but recent scholarship has
proved that The Flour e and the Leafe is much later than
Chaucer, and that The Cuckow and the Nightingale was
written by Sir Thomas Clanvowe about a.d. 1 405— 1 o.

44. The Shepheardes Calender: Conteyning Twelve
Aeglogues, Proportionable to the Twelve Monethes.
By Edmund Spenser. Edited by F. S. Ellis. Medium 4to.
Golden type. In black and red. With twelve full-page illus-
trations by A. J. Gaskin. 22 on paper at a guinea, 6 on vellum
at three guineas. Dated Oct. 14, issued Nov. 26, 1896.
Published at the Kelmscott Press. Bound in half holland.

The illustrations in this book were printed from process
blocks by Walker and Boutall. By an oversight the names of
author, editor, and artist were omitted from the colophon.

41b. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume III. May: The Story of Cupid and Psyche. The
Writing on the Image. June: The Love of Alcestis. The
Lady of the Land. Medium 4to. Golden type. In black
and red. Borders 30a, 30, 27a, 28, and 29. 225 on paper at
thirty shillings, 6 on vellum at seven guineas. Dated Aug.

24, issued Dec. 5, 1896. Published at the Kelmscott Press.
Bound in limp vellum.

41c. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume IV. July: The Son of Croesus. The Watching of
the Falcon. August: Pygmalion and the Image. Ogier
the Dane. Medium 4to. Golden type. In black and red.
Borders 31a, 31, 29a, 29, 28a, 28, 30a, and 30. Dated Nov.

25, 1896, issued Jan. 22, 1897. Published at the Kelmscott
Press. Bound in limp vellum.

4id. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume V. September: The Death of Paris. The Land East
of the Sun and West of the Moon. October : The Story
of Acontius and Cydippe. The Man who never laughed
again. Medium 4to. Golden type. In black and red. Borders
29a, 29, 27a, 27, 28a, 28, 31a, and 31. Finished Dec. 24,

166

1 896, issued Mar. 9, 1897. Published at the Kelmscott Press.
Bound in limp vellum.

41c The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume VI. November: The Story of Rhodope. The Lovers
of Gudrun. Medium 4to. Golden type. In black and red.
Borders 27a, 27, 30a, and 30. Finished Feb. 18, issued May
1 1, 1 897. Published at the Kelmscott Press. Bound in limp
vellum.

4if. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume VII. December: The Golden Apples. The Fostering
of Aslaug. January: Bellerophon at Argos. The Ring
given to Venus. Medium 4to. Golden type. In black and
red. Borders 29a, 29, 31, 30a, 30, 27a, and 27. Finished
March 17, issued July 29, 1897. Published at the Kelmscott
Press. Bound in limp vellum.

45. The Water of the Wondrous Isles by William
Morris. Large 4to. Chaucer type, in double columns, with
a few lines of Troy type at the end of each of the seven parts.
In black and red. Borders 1 6a, 17a, 1 8a, 19, and 19a. 2 50 on
paper at three guineas, 6 on vellum at twelve guineas. Dated
April 1, issued July 29, 1897. Published at the Kelmscott
Press. Bound in limp vellum.

Unlike The Well at the World's End, with which it is
mainly uniform, this book has red shoulder-notes and no
illustrations. Morris began the story in verse on Feb. 4,
1895. A ^ew days later he began it afresh in alternate prose
and verse; but he was again dissatisfied, and finally began it a
third time in prose alone, as it now stands. It was first an-
nounced as in the press in the list of June 1, 1896, at which
date the early chapters were in type, although they were not
printed until about a month later. The designs for the ini-
tial words "Whilom" and "Empty" were begun by Morris
shortly before his death, and were finished by R. Catterson-
Smith. Another edition was published by Longmans on Oct.
1,1897.

4ig. The Earthly Paradise. By William Morris. Vol-
ume VIII. February: Bellerophon in Lycia. TheHillof

167

Venus. Epilogue. L'envoi. Medium 4to. Golden type. In
black and red. Borders 28a, 28, 29a, and 29. Finished June
10, issued Sept. 27, 1 897. Published at the Kelmscott Press.
Bound in limp vellum.

The colophon of this final volume of The Earthly Paradise
contains the following note: "The borders in this edition of
The Earthly Paradise were designed by William Morris, ex-
cept those on page 4 of volumes II., III., and IV., afterwards
repeated, which were designed to match the opposite borders,
under William Morris'sdirection, by R. Catterson-Smith ; who
also finished the initial words 'Whilom' and 'Empty' for The
Water of the Wondrous Isles. All the other letters, borders,
title-pages and ornaments used at the Kelmscott Press, ex-
cept the Greek type in Atalanta in Calydon, were designed by
William Morris."

46. Two Trial Pages of the Projected Edition of Lord
Berners' Translation of Froissart's Chronicles. Folio.
Chaucer type, with heading in Troy type. In black and red.
Border 32, containing the shields of France, the Empire, and
England, and a half-border containing those of Reginald Lord
Cobham, Sir John Chandos, and Sir Walter Manny. 1 60 on
vellum at a guinea, none on paper. Dated September, issued
October 7, 1897. Published at the Kelmscott Press. Not
bound.

It was Morris's intention to make this edition of what
had been since his college days almost his favourite book, a
worthy companion to the Chaucer. It was to have been in two
volumes folio, with new cusped initials and heraldic orna-
ments throughout. Each volume was to have had a large
frontispiece designed by Burne-Jones; the subject of the
first was to have been St. George, that of the second, Fame.
A trial page was set up in the Troy type soon after it came from
the foundry, in Jan. 1 892. Early in 1893 trial pages were set
up in the Chaucer type, and in the list for March 9 of that year
the book is erroneously stated to be in the press. In the three
following lists it is announced as in preparation. In the list
dated Dec. 1, 1893, and in the three next lists, it is again
announced as in the press, and the number to be printed is
given as 1 50. Meanwhile the printing of the Chaucer had

168

been begun, and as it was not feasible to carry on two folios at
the same time, the Froissart again comes under the heading
"in preparation" in the lists from Dec. i, 1894, to June I,

1896. In the prospectus of The Shepheardes Calender, dated
Nov. 12, 1896, it is announced as abandoned. At that time
about thirty-four pages were in type, but no sheet had been
printed. Before the type was broken up, on Dec. 24, 1896,32
copies of sixteen of these pages were printed and given to per-
sonal friends of the poet and printer, whose death now made
the completion of the book impossible. This suggested the
idea of printing two pages for wider distribution. The half-
border had been engraved in April 1894 by W. Spielmeyer,
but the large border only existed as a drawing. It was en-
graved with great skill and spirit by C. E. Keates, and the two
pages were printed by Stephen Mowlem, with the help of an
apprentice, in a manner worthy of the designs.

47. Sire Degrevaunt. Edited by F. S. Ellis after the edition
printed by J. O. Halliwell. 8vo. Chaucer type. In black and
red. Borders 1 a and 1 , and a woodcut designed by Sir Edward
Burne-Jones. 350 on paper at fifteen shillings, 8 on vellum at
four guineas. Dated Mar. 14, 1896, issued Nov. 12, 1897.
Published at the Kelmscott Press. Bound in half holland.

This book, subjects from which were painted by Burne-
Jones on the walls of the Red House, Upton, Bexley Heath,
many years ago, was always a favourite with Morris. The
frontispiece was not printed until October 1897, eighteen
months after the text was finished.

48. Syr Ysambrace. Edited by F. S. Ellis after the edition
printed by J. O. Halliwell from the MS. in the Library of
Lincoln Cathedral, with some corrections. 8vo. Chaucer type.
In black and red. Borders 4a and 4, and a woodcut designed
by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. 3 50 on paper at twelve shillings,
8 on vellum at four guineas. Dated July 14, issued Nov. 1 1,

1897. Published at the Kelmscott Press. Bound in half
holland.

This is the third and last of the reprints from the Camden
Society's volume of Thornton Romances. The text was all
set up and partly printed by June 1 896, at which time it was
intended to include "Sir Eglamour" in the same volume.

169

49- Some German Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Cen-
tury. Being thirty-five reproductions from books that were
in the library of the late William Morris. Edited, with a list of
the principal woodcut books in that library, by S. C. Cockerell.
Large 4to. Golden type. In red and black. 225 on paper at
thirty shillings, 8 on vellum at five guineas. Dated Dec. 15,
1897, issued January 6, 1898. Published at the Kelmscott
Press. Bound in half holland.

Of these thirty-five reproductions twenty-nine were all
that were done of a series chosen by Morris to illustrate a
catalogue of his library, and the other six were prepared by
him for an article in the 4th number of Bibliographica, part of
which is reprinted as an introduction to the book. The pro-
cess blocks (with one exception) were made by Walker and
Boutall, and are of the same size as the original cuts.

50. The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of
theNiblungs. By William Morris. Small folio. Chaucer
type, with title and headings to the four books in Troy type.
In black and red. Borders 33a and 33, and two illustrations
designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. 160 on paper at six
guineas, 6 on vellum at twenty guineas. Dated January 19,
issued February 25, 1898. Published at the Kelmscott Press.
Bound in limp vellum.

The two borders used in this book were almost the last
that Morris designed. They were intended for an edition of
The Hill of Venus, which was to have been written in prose
by him and illustrated by Burne-Jones. The foliage was sug-
gested by the ornament in two Psalters of the last half of the
thirteenth century in the library at Kelmscott House. The
initial A at the beginning of the third book was designed in
March 1893 for the Froissart, and does not appear elsewhere.

An edition of Sigurd the Volsung, which Morris consid-
ered to be his masterpiece, was contemplated early in the his-
tory of the Kelmscott Press. An announcement appears in
a proof of the first list, dated April 1 892, but it was excluded
from the list as issued in May. It did not reappear until the
list of November 26, 1895, m wnicn> the Chaucer being near
its completion, Sigurd comes under the heading "in prepara-
tion," as a folio in Troy type, "with about twenty-five illus-

170

trations by Sir E. Burne-Jones." In the list of June I, 1896,
it is finally announced as "in the press," the number of illus-
trations is increased to forty, and other particulars are given.
Four borders had then been designed for it, two of which were
used on pages 470 and 47 1 of the Chaucer. The other two
have not been used, though one of them has been engraved.
Two pages only were in type, thirty-two copies of which were
struck off on Jan. 11, 1 897, and given to friends, with the six-
teen pages of Froissart mentioned above.

51. The Sundering Flood written by William Morris.
Overseen for the press by May Morris. 8vo. Chaucer type.
In black and red. Border 1 o, and a map. 300 on paper at two
guineas, 10 on vellum at ten guineas. Dated Nov. 15, 1897,
issued Feb. 25, 1898. Published at the Kelmscott Press.
Bound in half holland.

This was the last romance by William Morris. He began
to write it on Dec. 21, 1895, anc^ dictated the final words on
Sept. 8, 1 896. The map pasted into the cover was drawn by
H. Cribb for Walker and Boutall, who prepared the block. In
the edition that Longmans are about to issue the bands of
robbers called in the Kelmscott edition Red and Black Skinners
appear correctly as Red and Black Skimmers. The name was
probably suggested by that of the pirates called "escumours of
the sea" on page 1 54 of Godefrey of Boloyne.

52. Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond: A
Morality. Written by William Morris. Large 4to. Troy
type, with stage directions in Chaucer type. In black, red and
blue. Borders 6a and 7, and two illustrations designed by Sir
Edward Burne-Jones. 300 on paper at two guineas, 8 on
vellum at ten guineas. Dated Dec. 1 1, 1897, issued Mar. 24,
1898. Published at the Kelmscott Press. Bound in limp
vellum.

This was the second book printed in three colours at the
Kelmscott Press. As explained in the colophon, the final pic-
ture was not designed for this edition of Love is Enough, but for
the projected edition referred to above, on page 139.

53. A Note by William Morris on his Aims in founding
the Kelmscott Press, together with a Short Description

171

of the Press by S. C. Cockerell, and an Annotated List
of the Books printed thereat. Octavo. Golden type, with
five pages in the Troy and Chaucer types. In black and red.
Borders 4a and 4, and a woodcut designed by Sir E. Burne-
Jones. 525 on paper at ten shillings, 12 on vellum at two
guineas. Dated March 4, issued March 24, 1898. Published
at the Kelmscott Press. Bound in half holland.

The frontispiece to this book was engraved by William
Morris for the projected edition of The Earthly Paradise de-
scribed on page 139. This block and the blocks for the three
ornaments on page 9 are not included among those mentioned
on page 144 as having been sent to the British Museum.

VARIOUS LISTS, LEAFLETS AND ANNOUNCE-
MENTS PRINTED AT THE KELMSCOTT
PRESS.

Eighteen lists of the books printed or in preparation at the
Kelmscott Press were issued to booksellers and subscribers.
The dates of these are May, July, and Dec. 1892; March 9,
May 20, May 27, Aug. 1, and Dec. 1, 1893; March 31,
April 2 1 , July 2, Oct. 1 (a leaflet), and Dec. 1 , 1894; July 1 ,
and Nov. 26, 1895; June h 1896; Feb. 16, and July 28, 1897.
The three lists for 1 892, and some copies of that for Mar. 9,
1893, were printed on Whatman paper, the last of the stock
bought for the first edition of The Roots of the Mountains (see
page 140). Besides these, twenty-nine announcements, relat-
ing mainly to individual books, were issued ; and eight leaflets,
containing extracts from the lists, were printed for distribu-
tion by Messrs. Morris and Co.

The following items, as having a more permanent interest
than most of these announcements, merit a full description :

1 . Two forms of invitation to the annual gatherings of the
Hammersmith Socialist Society on Jan. 30, 1892, and Feb.
11,1893. Golden type.

172

2. A four-page leaflet for the Ancoats Brotherhood, with the
frontispiece from the Kelmscott Press edition of A Dream
of John Ballon the first page. March 1894. Golden type.
2500 copies.

3. An address to Sir Lowthian Bell, Bart., from his employes,
dated 30th June 1 894. 8 pages. Golden type. 250 on paper
and 2 on vellum.

4. A leaflet, with fly-leaf, headed An American Memorial to
Keats, together with a form of invitation to the unveiling of
his bust in Hampstead Parish Church on July 16, 1894.
Golden type. 7 50 copies.

5. A slip giving the text of a memorial to Dr. Thomas Sadler,
for distribution at the unveiling of it in Rosslyn Hill Chapel,
Hampstead. Nov. 1894. Golden type. 450 copies.

6. Scholarship certificates for the Technical Education Board
of the London County Council, printed in the oblong borders
designed for the pictures in Chaucer s Works. One of these
borders was not used in the book, and this is its only appear-
ance. The first certificate was printed in Nov. 1 894, and was
followed in Jan. 1896 by eleven certificates; in Jan. 1897
by six certificates; and in Feb. 1898 by eleven certificates, all
differently worded. Golden type. The numbers varied from
12 to 2 500 copies.

7. Programmes of the Kelmscott Press annual wayzgoose for
the years 1892—5. These were printed without supervision
from William Morris.

8. Specimen showing the three types used at the Press for in-
sertion in the first edition of Strange s Alphabets. March 1895.
2000 ordinary copies and 60 on large paper.

9. Card for Associates of the Deaconess Institution for the
Diocese of Rochester. One side of this card is printed in
Chaucer type; on the other there is a prayer in the Troy type
enclosed in a small border which was not used elsewhere. It
was designed for the illustrations of a projected edition of The
House of the Wolfings. April 1897. 25ocopies.

173

Other works announced in the lists as in preparation,
but afterwards abandoned, were The Tragedies, Histories, and
Comedies of William Shakespeare; Caxton's Vitas Patrum; the
Poems of Theodore Watts-Dunton ; and A Catalogue of the
Collection of Woodcut Books, Early Printed Books, and Manuscripts
at Kelmscott House. The text of the Shakespeare was to have
been prepared by Dr. Furnivall. The original intention, as
first set out in the list of May 20, 1 893, was to print it in three
vols, folio. Two trial pages from Macbeth, printed at this
time, are in existence. The same information is repeated until
the list of July 2, 1895, in which the book is announced as to
be a "small 4to (special size)," i.e. the size afterwards adopted
for The Earthly Paradise. It was not, however, begun, nor was
the volume of Mr. Watts-Dunton's Poems. Of the Vitas
Patrum, which was to have been uniform with The Golden
Legend, a prospectus and specimen were issued in March
1 894, but the number of subscribers did not justify its going
beyond this stage. Two trial pages of the Catalogue were set
up ; some of the material prepared for it has now appeared in
Some German Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century. In addition to
these books, The Hill of Venus, as stated on page 170, was in pre-
paration. Among works that Mr. Morris had some thought
of printing may also be mentioned the Bible, Gesta Romanorum,
Malory's Morte Darthur, The High History of the San Graal
(translated by Dr. Sebastian Evans), Piers Ploughman, Huon
of Bordeaux, Caxton's Jason, a Latin Psalter, The Prymer or hay
Folk's Prayer-Book, Some Medieval English Songs and Music,
The Pilgrim's Progress, and a Book of Romantic Ballads. He was
engaged on the selection of the Ballads, which he spoke of as
the finest poems in our language, during his last illness.

174

INDEX

Pages numbered in italics are those of the annotated list in which Mr. S. C.
Cocherell has given detailed and authoritative particulars of each book.

Academy, The, 84, 88, 101, 102

Aeneid, 93

Aims of Art, 37

Aldus, 21, 27

Allegory, 105

Allen, George, 149

Amber Witch, no

Amis and Ami le, 108, 757

Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 8, 49, 87,

108, 140, 155
Atalanta in Calydon, 15J
Athenaeum, The, 48, 50, 76, 96, 101, 105
Band, Henry, 64, 146
" Basel" type, 4, 51
Baskerville, 26

Batchelor, Joseph, 36, 62, 63, 136, 142
Bell & Daldy, 3
Bellamy, Edward, 104
Beowulf, 108, ijq

Biblia Innocentium, 82, 113, 145, 152
Binding, 146, 164
Binning, Thos., 5, 81
Blunt, Wilfrid, 82, 113, 145, 149
Bodoni, 25, 26, 69
Book of Wisdom and Lies, 91, 113, 145,

158
Bowden, Wm., 73, 81, 141
Bowden, Wm. H., 73, 74, 80, 81, 83,

85, 142
Burden, Miss E., 139
Burne- Jones, Sir Edward, 3, 4, 32, 79,

88, 89,92,95, 139, 144
Buxton Forman, H. B., 52, 53, 54
Calligraphy, 4, 17, 18, 23, 135, 140
Campfield, G. F., 6, 74, 139, 144
Caslon, Wm., 25, 26, 71
Catterson-Smith, R., 89, 92, 144
Cavendish, George, 154
Caxton, 109, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154

Chaucer, 59, 79, 80, 81, 84, 87, 88, 109,

128, 144, 145, 146, 162
" Chaucer" type, 57, 59, 84, 143
Child Christopher, 106, 161
Chiswick Press, 2, 3, 27, 36, 51, 52, 53,

79, 140, 162
Clutton-Brock, A., 34, 115
Cockerell, S. C, 90, 139, 148, 171
Colebrook, Frank, 69, 78
Coleridge's Poems, 161
Commonweal, The, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 37, 49,

81, 101, 103, 104, 114
Contemporary Review, The, 78, 88
Convention, 18, 122
Corrall, 27

Cotton, A. L., 78, 88, 115
Crane, Walter, 5, 126, 144
Daily Chronicle, The, 92
Daniels, Rev. Mr., 116
De Contemptu Mundi, 113, ijg
Decoration, 66 et seq., 88 et seq., 91, 138,

143
Defence of Guenevere, 3, 85, 92, 93, 95,

97, 144, 1 jo
De Vinne, Theodore, 28, 72
Didot, 25, 26
Dream of John Ball, A, 37, 46, 48, 79,

85, 103, 105, 130
Earthly Paradise, 3, 4, 12, 51, 79, 89, 92,

93>95> 97> 100, i39> H4> i45>-^"^7
Edinburgh Review, The, 97
Ellis, F. S., 3, 59, 85, 90
Ellis, H. M., 85
Ellis & Elvey, 156, 157
Elzevirs, 25

Emperor Coustans, 108, ijS
English Illustrated Magazine, 74, 10 1
Fann Street Foundry, 57
Faulkner, C. J., 139

Floure and the Leafe, 145, i6j

Fortnightly Review, The, 96, 101, 140

Froissart, 94, 95, in, 168

Garamond, Claude, 22, 24

Garnett, Dr. Richard, 95

Gaskin, A. J., 79, 144

Gere, C. M., 78, 144

German Woodcuts of the /jth Century,

Some, 144, 770
Glittering Plain, Story of the, 57, 59, 63,

64> 74» 75> 76, 78, 80, 82, 89, 104,

126, 144, 145, 146, 148, 756
Godefrey of Boloyne, 84, 86, 1 10, 154
Golden Legend, The, 62, 63, 74, 80, 81,
^ 82, 85, 86, 92, 109, 144, 145, 146, 750
" Golden " type, 57, 59, 141
Gothic Architecture, 87, 108, ijj
Gunnlaug Wormtongue, 53, 140
Hand and Soul, 91, 113, 161
Havelok the Dane, 106
Headlines, 53, 124
Herrick's Poems, 161
Hooper, W. H., 4, 36, 75,86,92, 140, 144
House of the Wolfings, 4, 36, 50, 51, 53,

63, 102, 103, 104, 140, 144
Howard, Wm., 51, 57, 119
Illustrations, 88, 125 et seq., 144
Ink, 64 et seq., 146
Jacobi, C. T., 28, 36, 51
Jaenecke, 65, 66, 146
James, Henry, 96
Jason, Life and Death of, 3, 92, 93, 95,

96, 160
Jenson, Nicholas, 20, 37, 58, 136
Jones, Henry Arthur, 128
Keates, C. E., 144
Keats' Poems, 757
Kegan Paul, 29
Kelmscott Manor, 73, 104
King Florus, 108, ij6
King's Lesson, A, 97, ijo
Knight, Joseph, 96
Lang, Andrew, 95
Large-paper copies, 52, 140
Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis, i6j
Lefevre, Raoul, 151
Leighton, J. & J., 146
Lethaby, W. R., 23, 46, 54, 67
Leverett, A., 144
Literary Gazette, The, 95, 96
London Society of Compositors, 81
Longman & Co., 162
Looking Backward, 104
Love is Enough, 4, 7, 82, 92, 99, 100,

139,77/
Love Lyrics, Blunt, 82, 113, 145, ij.g

Mackail, J. W., 113, 152

Macmillan & Co., 86, 113, 155

Magnusson, Eirikr, 100

Malory, 94, 107

Maud, 86, 91, 113, ijj

Meinhold, Wm., no, 155

Merton Abbey, 32

Michel Angelo, 33

Middleton, J. H., 100

More's Utopia, 154

Morley, John, 98

Morris & Co., 4, 49, 74

Morris, Miss May, 58

Murray, C. Fairfax, 101, 113, 144, 159

Nation, The, 96

Nature of Gothic, 82, 85, 109, 145, 14Q

News from Nowhere, 46, 79, 104, 105,

153

Nineteenth Century, The, 88, 106
North American Review, The, 96
Norton, Charles Eliot, 96
Note by William Morris on his Aims in

founding the Kelmscott Press, 90, 777
Odyssey, 37, 93

Order of Chivalry , 84, 108, 145, 7JJ
Over Sea, 108, ij8

Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 2, 102
Pages, Balance of, 51 et seq., 137
Paper, 60 et seq., 135, 145
Pickering, Wm., 27
Pine, Mrs., 73, 82
Poems by the Way, 12, 80, 81, 82, 89, 92,

10 1, 145, 148
Presses, 68 et seq., 146
Prices of books, 77
Prince, E. P., 36, 57, 119, 137, 141

et seq.
Prinsep, Val, 95
P salmi Penitentiales, ijq
Punchcutting, 51, 57, 119
Quaritch, B., 113, 151, 152, 156
Quarterly Review), The, 46
Red House, 4
Reed, T. B., 17, 57
Reeves & Turner, 53, 73, 76, 148, 149,

150, 152, 153, 154
Reproductions, 71
Reynard the Foxe, 84, no, 152
Ricketts, Chas., 121
Riegel, Dr. Julius, 97
Rollers and Pelt-balls, 69
Roots of the Mountains, 47, 52, 53, 63,

104, 107, 140, 141
Rossetti, D. G., 2, 3, 7, 95, 99
Rossetti's Poems, 91, 113, ij6, 15J
Ruskin, John, 96, 109, 149

Saturday Review, The, 104, 107

Savonarola, 113, 159

Scottish Review, The, 86

Shakespeare's Poems, 8 7, fjj

Shelley's Poems, 158, 160, 161

Shepheardes Calender, 144, 145, 166

Sidonia the Sorceress, no, 15 5

Sigurd the Volsung, 92, 93, 101, 145, 1/0

Sire Degrevaunt, 112, 16Q

Skelton, John, 95

Socialist League, 5, 1 14

Spacing, 137

Spectator, The, 96, 105

Spelling, 6, 84

Spenser, Edmund, 144

Spielmeyer, W., 144

Steele, Robert, 46, 52

Stones of Venice, 109

Sundering Flood, 107, 144, iji

Sussex Cottage and House, 81

Sweynheym & Pannartz, 59

Swinburne, A. C, 96, 106, ij/

Syr Percy velle of Gales, 112, 160

Syr Tsambrace, 112, 160

Tennyson, A., 86, 91, 113, 133

Three Northern Love Stories, 140

Time, 10 1

Times, The, 96

Tory, Geoffroy, 22

" Troy " type, 57, 59, 81, 84, 142

Troye, Recuyell of the Historyes of, 80, 81,

84, 86, 109, 144, jji
Turner, Thackeray, 36
Turney, W. J. & Co., 64, 146
Type, 20 et seq., 51, 57 etseq., 122, 136,

141, 142, 143, 145
Utopia, Sir Thos. More's, 154
Vellum, 63 et seq., 146
Volsunga Saga, 100
Voragine, Jacobus de, 150
Walker, Emery, 7, 8, 9, 36, 51, 58, 62,

63> 73> 8r> 9°> HQj H1
Walpole, Horace, 116
Wardle, G. Y., 139
Wardrop, Oliver, 113, 158
Water of the Wondrous Isles, 79, 107,

144, 167
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 53
Way & Williams, Chicago, 113, 161
Webb, Philip, 32, 95
Well at the World's End, 79, 105, 106,

107, 144, 162
Wells, H. G., 107
Whittier, J. G., 98
Whittingham, Chas. I., 27
Whittingham, Chas. II., 2, 27, 51
Wilde, Lady, 155
Wolsey, Life of, 82, 154.
Wood beyond the World, 79, 105, 106,138
Wyatt, A. J., 159

THE END

Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

Crown Svo. $s. 6d. net.

WILLIAM MORRIS

ALFRED NOYES

{English Men of Letters)

THE DAIL Y TELEGRAPH.—11 There is a great deal of delicate
observation in the volume, acute and original criticism, a quick discernment
of beauties and an obvious admiration for the subject of the memoir."

THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE. — "A distinguished literary
achievement, well deserving of a high place among the honoured company in
which it has been placed."

THE MORNING POST— -"Mr. Noyes has eminent qualities as a
critic of poetry, and those responsible for this series have done well in inviting
him to undertake this work."

THE CAMBRIDGE REVIEW.— •" A very interesting and very
enjoyable book."

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JOURNALS OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH.

Edited by William Knight. New Edition. Complete in
one Volume. With Portrait. Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. net.

THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE CHRONO-
LOGICALLY ARRANGED. In three Volumes. With
Introductions by Charles Whibley, and 40 Illustrations.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net each. Half morocco, 10s. 6d.
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In Uniform Binding. Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. net each.

New Volume.
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LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO, Ltd.
2

DATE DUE

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