Morris

In January 1891, in a rented house at 16 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, two doors down from his London family-house Kelmscott House on the Thames riverside, William Morris, fifty-six years old, the Walthamstow-born poet-designer-and-socialist who had founded the Arts and Crafts movement at his 1861 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co firm and who had spent the previous five years in the Hammersmith Socialist League political-organisational work, set up the Kelmscott Press, the private-press he had been planning since the 1888 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society lecture by Emery Walker on the decline of late-Victorian commercial typography. The Press had two iron hand-presses, one Kelmscott-bespoke wood-cut typeface (the Golden Type, cut by Edward Prince to Morris's design after the fifteenth-century Nicolas Jenson Roman of Venice), and a three-man workforce: Morris himself as the designer, the compositor William Bowden, and the pressman Thomas Binning. The first Kelmscott book, The Story of the Glittering Plain by William Morris, was published in May 1891 in a two-hundred-copy edition on hand-made paper at the list-price of two guineas (about £300 in 2025 money). The Press operated until Morris's death in October 1896 and produced fifty-three Kelmscott books in total, including the monumental Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896 (the folio illustrated edition of Geoffrey Chaucer with eighty-seven Edward Burne-Jones wood-engravings, the foundational book of the late-Victorian private-press movement). The Kelmscott Press inaugurated the British private-press tradition that continued through the Doves Press (1900), the Ashendene Press (1894), the Eragny Press (1894), the Essex House Press (1898), and the Golden Cockerel Press (1920), and that produced, by every careful judgment of book-history (David Pearson, Peter Allen, Mike Phillpotts), the foundational design-revival of twentieth-century English-language book-design.

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