Morris and the Kelmscott Press

Some revivals begin in protest against an age, and some begin in protest against a single ugly page. The man who would reform the look of the printed book in the English language did not start with a manifesto. He started with two second-hand iron presses in a rented room by the river, and a face of type cut in the manner of Venice four hundred years before, and a quiet conviction that the commercial printing of his own decade was, in plain reading, the worst that had been set since Gutenberg.

THE MAN AT FIFTY-SIX

William Morris of Walthamstow was, by the winter of 1891, almost everything a Victorian could be at once and still keep his temper. Born on the twenty-fourth of March 1834, son of a City bill-broker and Emma Shelton, schooled at Marlborough and at Exeter College Oxford, he had come down from the university in 1855 with Edward Burne-Jones and a Pre-Raphaelite circle for company and had never afterwards been alone in a room without designs in it. He had founded, in 1861, the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co at Red Lion Square, reconstituted it in 1875 as Morris and Co, written The Earthly Paradise and Sigurd the Volsung, translated the Odyssey and the Icelandic sagas, lectured for the Hammersmith Socialist League through five hard winters of street meetings and pamphlets, and kept his kidneys, his temper, and his wife's affections in varying degrees of repair. He held, after fifty-six years, that the true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, and the detail he meant to take an interest in now was the printed page.

THE LECTURE AT THE NEW GALLERY

The hinge had been laid three years earlier. On a November evening in 1888, at the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in Regent Street, his friend Emery Walker stood up with a magic-lantern and showed enlarged slides of fifteenth-century Venetian printing beside the narrow, mean, over-inked display faces of the London commercial houses. Morris sat in the audience and saw, blown up on the screen, what he had been refusing to look at on his own bookshelves for thirty years. The Caslon and Bodoni faces of the eighteenth century had been driven out. What replaced them was unreadable by any human eye trained to take pleasure in letters. He walked home along the Hammersmith pavement that night with Walker and proposed, before they reached the Mall, that they cut a type of their own.

THE ROOM AT UPPER MALL

Now it is twenty past three on a Thursday afternoon in January 1891, in the front room of number sixteen Upper Mall, two doors along the Hammersmith embankment from his own Kelmscott House. The river light is pale and low; the Thames is the colour of pewter behind the window glass. Two iron hand-presses stand on the bench, an Albion of the 1840s and a Liberty of the 1860s, bought second-hand for forty pounds the pair from Robert Stallybrass of City Road. Beside them lies the wooden case of the Golden Type, cut over the previous summer by Edward Prince, the foremost punch-cutter in London, to Morris's drawings after the Roman of Nicolas Jenson, Venice, 1476. The compositor William Bowden is sorting sorts at the case. The pressman Thomas Binning is oiling the platen. Morris has The Story of the Glittering Plain in proof on the bench in front of him, his own romance, set in his own letter, on his own paper from Joseph Batchelor of Little Chart in Kent, ready to be the first thing the new press prints.

A SECOND OF TIME

He has, on his doctor's reading of the gout and the kidney complaint, perhaps seven years left, and he knows it. The arithmetic is in the room with him as plainly as the smell of printer's ink. Seven years against fifty-three centuries of letterforms; seven years against the whole next century of English-language printing. He picks up a proof sheet and runs his thumb along the inner margin where the type stands proud of the paper. Jenson's proportion. Jenson's weight of line. Jenson's generosity at the inside gutter. The thing is, against every expectation he had carried into the room, beautiful. He has the thought, and has it without surprise, that he is not founding a business. The Press will not return the investment. It will return something less negotiable. He had said it himself, in a lecture two winters before, that he wanted his books to be works of art as well as conveyances of thought, and the proof on the bench is, in the simplest reading, the first one. He sets it down. He nods to Bowden. The afternoon goes on.

THE FIRST BOOK AND AFTER

The Story of the Glittering Plain was published in May 1891 in an edition of two hundred copies on hand-made paper, at two guineas the copy, and sold out before the binders finished sewing. Forty-six more titles followed in the next five years, set in the Golden, the Troy and the Chaucer types, printed on Batchelor paper and on vellum from Henry Band of Brentford, bound in limp vellum with silk ties. Burne-Jones drew the borders and the figure-blocks. The Press grew from three men to thirty. By 1894 it could no longer be called private in any commercial sense; the booksellers of Bond Street were placing standing orders, and the second-hand prices of the first issues had doubled before the third issues appeared.

THE CHAUCER

The book he was working towards from the first proof of the first afternoon was the Chaucer. Eighty-seven Burne-Jones wood-engravings, cut by W. H. Hooper from the painter's pencil designs; a folio of five hundred and fifty-six pages set in the Chaucer type; borders and initials drawn by Morris himself through the last summer of his life, propped on pillows when he could no longer sit at the desk. Four hundred and twenty-five paper copies and thirteen on vellum. It was finished on the second of June 1896 and the first bound copy was put into his hands at Kelmscott House on the twenty-fourth. Burne-Jones, writing afterwards, called it like a pocket cathedral. Morris held it for a long time without speaking and then said it would do.

THE RETURN

He died at Kelmscott House on the third of October 1896, four months after the Chaucer was delivered, of the kidney complaint his doctor had named in 1891. His physician wrote on the certificate that the cause was simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men. The Press continued for eighteen months under Sydney Cockerell and F. S. Ellis, and wound up in March 1898 with Sigurd the Volsung in the Troy type, fifty-three books in all. Out of the Hammersmith room came the Doves Press in 1900, the Ashendene in 1894, the Eragny in 1894, the Essex House in 1898, the Golden Cockerel in 1920, and through them the whole reform of twentieth-century English book design that runs from Stanley Morison's Times Roman to the Penguin paperback. He is buried in the churchyard at Kelmscott in west Oxfordshire, beside the Manor on the upper Thames, in a tomb of grey Cotswold stone designed by Philip Webb with a shallow-pitched ridge like the roof of a cottage. There is no inscription beyond his name and his dates, set in a letter cut to the proportion of the Golden Type, on a stone the rain has been weathering for a hundred and thirty years.