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ARTS AND CRAFTS Lasting Impressions

The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, by William S. Peterson

William Morris did not think the human race was ever likely to solve the question of its own existence, but he wanted society to change in such a way that the question would not be ‘Why were we born to be so miserable?’ but ‘Why were we born to be so happy?’ By 1890 he knew he probably would not see these changes in his lifetime. He felt old, he knew he had diabetes, and he realized that his outstanding natural energy was deserting him. Work was his natural recreation. It was at this point that he turned to the last of his handcrafts, making books.

It was to be ‘a little typographical adventure,’ to see whether he could produce books through traditional craftsmanship ‘which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing.’ At first there was no thought of selling, although later on Morris found he had to do so to meet some of the costs. Characteristically, he spent a year of inquiry and research into how things should be done. With an expert friend, the printer and process engraver Emery Walker, he looked into presses, inks, and handmade papers. (The artist Robin Tanner, lecturing in 1986 at the age of eighty-two, held up a sheet of the paper Morris chose: ‘Listen to it! How it rings! What music!’) New types, of course, had to be designed. For his Golden type Morris turned for a model to fifteenth-century Venice, and for the blackletter Troy to fifteenth-century Germany. What mattered to him most was the total effect of the integrated pages, verso and recto together. Disagreeing fiercely with many other designers, both then and now, he believed that the page should be a solid, brilliant black and white.

Between 1891 and 1898 the Kelmscott Press (named for Morris’s house by the river in Oxfordshire) issued fifty-two wonderful books. Some were illustrated, some had lavish borders and initials designed by Morris himself, some were small, delicate 16mo volumes. The only way to judge them is to hold them and turn the pages. The culmination of the whole series, the great Kelmscott Chaucer, was finished only just in time. In June 1896, after more than three years in production, the sumptuous first copy was put into Morris’s hands. Three months later he was dead. ‘But I cannot believe,’ he had said, ‘that I shall be annihilated.’

This year, 1991, then, is the centenary of the Kelmscott Press, and its history, The Kelmscott Press, has now been written by William Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, who also, in 1984, produced the bibliography of the press. He says that he suspects more has been written about William Morris than any other printer but Gutenberg. But a great deal of new evidence has become available since the last full-length study, in 1924, by Henry Halliday Sparling, Morris’s unsatisfactory son-in-law. All of it is here, in the clearest, most readable, most scholarly form that anyone could ask for.

First Mr Peterson gives the background of Victorian book production, correcting the notion that the Kelmscott Press arose, without precedents, out of nowhere. He considers the life-giving force of Victorian medievalism and Morris’s part in it, and, on the other hand, Morris’s awkward position as a socialist employer and as a producer of fine books that only the rich could afford. Mr Peterson follows the story of the press itself step by step, with all its improvisations and successes. In a particularly helpful chapter he pauses to give the production history of three individual Kelmscott books—Morris’s own Poems by the Way (1891), The Golden Legend (1892), and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Love-Lyrics & Songs of Proteus (1892). All these illustrate Morris’s progress as a typographer, and Songs of Proteus, as Mr Peterson says, ‘gives off echoes of very odd psychological resonances’ since Blunt, only a few years earlier, had been the lover of Morris’s wife, Jane.

The history of the press, in fact, is also a history of human emotions and human friendships. Fortunately, Mr Peterson is as interested in these as in the art of the book. He doesn’t let us lose sight of the helpful, patient, skilled craftsman, Emery Walker, who nursed Morris in his last illness; the invaluable but deeply self-satisfied secretary, Sydney Cockerell; and the oldest friend of all, the artist Edward Burne-Jones. If he is capable of unfairness Mr Peterson is perhaps a little unfair to Burne-Jones. True, his delicate, silvery pencil drawings for the Chaucer meant endless hard work for other people before they could appear as wood engravings, but Morris wanted Burne-Jones illustrations and no others. At every turn, however, Mr Peterson’s attitude is courteous and sympathetic, above all to Morris himself. Indeed, Morris and Mr Peterson seem to be in a kind of partnership, interpreting together Morris’s genius and his shortcomings.

The influence of the ‘typographical experiment’ was powerful in northern Europe and the United States until the turn of the century, but is difficult to assess today. Reluctantly Mr Peterson concludes that the gap between the private printer and ‘the automated realm of offset presses and computerized typesetting’ has come to define two separate worlds. But he still believes that ‘the profound questions that Morris posed about the triumph of the machine’ are relevant to everyone in a technological society. Can we recover not only simpler and slower methods and infinitely higher quality, but a joy and freedom in work which, perhaps, once existed? Can we rebuild the foundations?