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Please note that these pages are from our old (pre-2010) website; the presentation of these pages may now appear outdated and may not always comply with current accessibility guidelines. |
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| Perhaps the most famous of the private presses, William Morris established the Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith in January 1891. Between then and 1898, the press produced 53 books (totalling some 18,000 copies). Kelmscott was the culmination of Morris's life as a craftsman in many diverse fields. He set out to prove that the high standards of the past could be repeated - even surpassed - in the present. The books Morris produced were therefore medieval in design, modelled on the incunabula of the fifteenth century. Morris's roman 'golden' type, for example, was inspired by that of the early printer Nicolaus Jenson of Venice. Noteworthy for their harmony of type and illustration, Morris' main priority was to have each book seen a a whole: this included taking painstaking care with all aspects of production, incuding the paper, the form of type, the spacing of the letters, and the position of the printed matter on the page. Kelmscott books re-awakened the ideals of book design and inspired better standards of production at a time when the printed page was generally at its poorest. Numerous other presses were set up to perpetuate Morris' aims, including the Doves, Eragny, Ashendene and Vale Presses. |
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frontispiece from The Well at the World's End |
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opening of The Well at the World's End |
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page of text from The Well at the World's End |
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frontispiece to Book III of The Well at the World's End |
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colophon of The Well at the World's End |
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frontispiece title-page from The History of Godefrey of Boloyne |
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opening from The History of Godefrey of Boulogne |
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page of text from The History of Godefrey of Boloyne |
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pages of text from Gothic Architecture |
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page of text from Sidonia the Sorceress |
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title-page & opening from Rossetti's Ballads and Narrative Poems |
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end of preface and opening of The Nature of Gothic |
