Morris · 1891
Morris and the Kelmscott Press
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.
It is twenty past three on the afternoon of an unrecorded Thursday in January 1891, in the front room of 16 Upper Mall in Hammersmith, west London, in pale winter light off the Thames-side window. He is fifty-six years old. He is William Morris, born at Elm House in Walthamstow, Essex, on the twenty-fourth of March 1834, son of the City-of-London-bill-broker William Morris the elder and Emma Shelton, schooled at Marlborough College and Exeter College Oxford (where he had been a Pre-Raphaelite-circle undergraduate from 1853–55 with the Edward Burne-Jones-and-Dante-Gabriel-Rossetti friendship that ran through the rest of his life), in his thirtieth year of the decorative-arts firm (the 1861 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co of Red Lion Square, the 1875 Morris and Co reconstruction).
On the bench in front of him are the two newly installed iron hand-presses (the Albion-press from the 1840s and the Liberty-press from the 1860s, bought second-hand from the City Road print-supply firm of Robert Stallybrass for forty pounds the pair), and a wooden type-case of the Golden Type, the bespoke late-fifteenth-century-style Roman typeface that Edward Prince, the foremost London punch-cutter of the period, had cut to Morris's design over the previous summer.
He thinks: the commercial typography of the 1880s is, in plain reading, the worst-designed printing of any decade since the fifteenth-century invention of the press. The Caslon-and-Bodoni faces of the eighteenth century have been displaced by the narrow-set Victorian display-types that no human eye reads with pleasure. The Kelmscott Press is the private corrective.
He thinks: the Kelmscott books will be the fifty-three small editions of the five-year life I have left in me. The publication will not pay back the investment. The investment is, in plain reading, the personal-legacy gesture of a fifty-six-year-old socialist publisher who has been told by his doctor that his kidney complaint is, on the 1891 medical-prognosis, fatal within seven years.
He thinks: I will die at sixty-two or sixty-three. The Kelmscott Press will produce, by my personal hand, the design-revival demonstration that the twentieth-century private-press movement will pick up. The private-press movement will, on the design-revival demonstration, reform the mass-market commercial typography of the next century.
The Kelmscott Press operated at 16 Upper Mall from January 1891 to March 1898 (the Press continued for eighteen months after Morris's death under his co-trustees Sydney Cockerell and F. S. Ellis). Fifty-three Kelmscott books were published in total. The monumental Kelmscott Chaucer (425 paper copies and 13 vellum copies, published 8 May 1896, with the eighty-seven Edward Burne-Jones wood-engravings) is the most-collected book of the British private-press tradition. The Press wound up in March 1898 with the final issue of Sigurd the Volsung.
William Morris died at Kelmscott House on the third of October 1896, sixty-two years old, of complications of Bright's-disease kidney-failure (the Bright's-disease prognosis that his doctor had given him in 1891 had been accurate). He is buried at the Kelmscott churchyard in west Oxfordshire, beside his cottage Kelmscott Manor on the Thames upper reaches, in the Morris family-plot with his daughters Jenny and May. The Kelmscott Manor is, since 1962, a museum under the Society of Antiquaries trusteeship.