Kelmscott Press

Background

Before Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, he had a strong interest in book design. Morris and Burne-Jones both admired illuminated manuscripts, and visited the Bodleian Library often to admire them. They also admired the works of Chaucer and Dürer. Morris carefully studied the techniques of the illuminators and the woodblock carvers in hopes of reviving that type of craftsmanship. Morris had some experience in contributing to and designing books before he founded the Kelmscott Press. He designed and illuminated books by hand, starting in 1870 with an anthology of his own poetry, A Book of Verse. He designed as well as wrote The House of Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890); he also designed The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue (1891). He had plans to make a richly illustrated version of his epic poem, The Earthly Paradise. He abandoned the project, but surviving trial pages show that the typefaces and illustrations are "incompatible".

Morris was not merely trying to replicate 15th-century printing practices. He preferred the iron hand-press of the 19th century to the medieval wooden ones, because the weaker wooden presses had to print on wet paper to get a print from a woodblock. Printing on wet paper weakened the press and subsequently, the book itself. Conveniently, iron hand-presses were still readily available in the 1890s. While modern rotary presses focused on speed and affordability, Morris did not. Some book dealers and designers disliked the newly popular, poorly produced books. Talbot Baines Reed, in an 1890 lecture on typography at the Society of Arts, complained that new typefaces were thin, harsh, and lacking dignity compared to old-face typefaces like Caslon and those of Nicholas Jenson. Morris expressed similar opinions.

Founding and history

Emery Walker, a book-collector, was friends and neighbours with Morris. In 1888, the Arts and Crafts Society sponsored several lectures including two by Walker on bookbinding and letterpress printing and illustration. His lecture included slides of books, including enlarged type to demonstrate good and bad book design. After the second lecture, Morris asked Walker to make a new font of type with him. Walker was initially skeptical, since he could not contribute capital. Walker told Morris where to buy high-quality tools and materials for printing, as well as where to hire skilled printers. In January 1891, Morris began renting a cottage near Kelmscott House, No. 16 Upper Mall in Hammersmith, which would serve as the first premises of the Kelmscott Press, before relocating to the neighbouring No. 14 in May, that same month in which the company was founded. The Kelmscott Press was named after Kelmscott Manor, Morris's home in Oxfordshire. While Morris did not pay himself any sort of salary, he usually broke even or made a little bit of money from the sales of Kelmscott Press books. Sales from smaller books, which were easier to produce and sell, supported production of folios and quartos. Morris organised outings for his workers and paid them above-average wages.

After Morris's death in 1896, Cockerell and Walker finished the last five volumes of The Earthly Paradise and ten other titles. Some had already been started or were in planning stages at the time of Morris's death. They lacked the decorations that Morris usually created for Kelmscott books.

Criticism

Critics of the Kelmscott Press note that fine press books are a part of commodity culture that is only accessible to the rich, which contrasts with Morris's socialist ideals. One of Morris's supporters, UC Davis professor Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, argues that Kelmscott was an attempt to create a utopian print space and that Morris's books were a criticism of mass print culture.

Critics during Morris's time wondered why he made expensive books that were inaccessible to most people when he was a socialist. Scholars have discussed the political implications of his work. According to Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, the Kelmscott Press and the idea of fine press books stand as a utopian criticism of mass print culture. Morris's work aligns with the "idealist" aesthetic, which centers around the way the task of art uplifts humanity to approach an ideal. Aestheticism divorced this marriage of artistic ideals with ethical ones, postulating that artistic ideals are artificial. Many critics of Morris see his work as part of the commodity culture that supported Aestheticism. Miller argues that Morris was working toward an ideal of production that made print a utopian space for post-revolutionary art. Kelmscott itself, as a disruptive force in printing, is utopian in a way defined by Frederic Jameson—that a radical break from the status quo is "reinforced by the Utopian form". Morris believed that the cultural impact of moveable type was not as considerable as people believed it was. Miller believes that the form of the Kelmscott books is utopian: the sharp lines of the wood-engraved illustrations "insist on its material presence" while the leafy borders common in Kelmscott books recall their place in nature while clearly delineating the artificiality of the image. The story of News from Nowhere described a utopia called "Nowhere", where communal discussion occurred in verbal discourse, textual communication being the language of bureaucracy. Verbal discussion is preferred in the story that book-making is dying out. Kelmscott tried to separate readers from the present by immersing them in archaic and futuristic production values.

Thorstein Veblen, in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), called Kelmscott's books a "conspicuous waste", arguing that they were less convenient and more expensive than regular books, showing that the purchaser had time and money to waste. Linda Dowling and William Peterson saw Morris's work at Kelmscott as being less political than his other work. Jeffrey Skoblow argued that the "rigorously materialist impulse" in the Kelmscott books was part of "a great Romantic-Marxist continuum" that explored commodification.