When Adam Delved & Eve Span

The Kelmscott Press was the most fruitful manifestation of Morris’s rejection of the modern industrial state. Morris hated the drab typography of late nineteenth-century commercial printing. Books, for Morris, had become shoddy commodities in a capitalist marketplace. Morris applied his romantic vision of the medieval craft guild to a small private press. Using the basic technologies developed by Gutenberg and his successors, he hired a team of artisans to set type of his own making, to execute woodcuts based on his designs and those of Edward Burne-Jones, and to print from a hand press on handmade paper. The results were stunning: Kelmscott Press issued some of the most beautifully printed books of the Victorian era. The Press’s output could never fulfill Morris’s socialist dreams—they were priced out of that class—but Kelmscott helped reintroduce typographic principles and fostered a movement that brought good design back to the mainstream.

1. William Shakespeare.  The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. Hammersmith: Doves Press, 1909. Hickmott 23 or Presses D751sh

2. William Shakespeare. The Poems of William Shakespeare. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1893. Hickmott 15 or Presses K299s
    

   These two editions of Shakespeare contrast the extravagance of Kelmscott Press and the restraint of the Doves Press. Philosophically in sync, but aesthetically opposed, they display the fine press movement’s medieval and humanist influences respectively.

3. Willa Cather. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Knopf, 1926. [1927 edition: Val 817C286 P6]
    

   Alfred Knopf was a champion of the typographic principles that emerged from Morris and his followers. He reasoned that it was wise to invest in good design and then spread the cost over thousands of copies of a trade book. His Borzoi Books set a new standard for commercial publishing and reached a mass audience.

4. Punch. 15 December 1883. Sine Serials NC1478 .P873
    

   Morris’s hypocrisy was not lost on his critics. Punch satirized him for championing the shared means of production, but not actually sharing profits with his workers.

Morris’s ideals of craft-based production failed to be realized when it came to their propagation. He nostalgically revived the medieval romance as the genre of the masses, but his works could only reach a broad audience through commercial publishing’s distribution networks. Many of the outrageously expensive fine press books produced by Kelmscott were also issued in cheap editions priced to sell, thus helping Morris to profit from the industrialized system that his writings and his life’s work aimed to critique.

1. The Manifesto of the Socialist League. London: Socialist League Office, 1885. Rare HX11.S63 M26 1885 
    

   Unlike lavish Kelmscott books, this pamphlet was cheaply produced and priced at one penny. Morris’s Socialist League had some success attracting membership—or at least attention—in the late 1880s, but disagreements with its anarchist elements led to its dissolution a few years before his death.

2. William Morris. Letters on Socialism. London: privately printed, 1894. Rare HX246 .M68 1894 
    

   A privately printed edition of Letters on Socialism (limited to 34 copies) framed the issue as a debate among select gentlemen, rather than a mass political movement.

3. William Morris. Hopes and Fears for Art. London: Longmans, Green, 1886. Library Depository 700.4 M834h [not available at Rauner]
4. William Morris. News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. London: Longmans, Green, 1920. Baker Berry 826 M834 T6 [not available at Rauner]

5. William Morris. The Life and Death of Jason, a Poem. London: Longmans, Green, 1914. Baker Berry 826 M834 S812 [not available at Rauner]
    

   Many of the cheap editions of Morris’s works were published by Longmans, Green. In Morris’s time, Longmans, Green published school textbooks, popular poetry, and mainstream social commentary such as the writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Stuart Mill.

6. Geoffrey Chaucer. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Now Newly Imprinted. Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. With original receipt, 1897. Presses K299c
    

   Rauner Library’s copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer was originally purchased by C. F. Richardson, Professor of English at Dartmouth College. The 1897 receipt shows that Richardson paid $160 for the text block, then an additional $104 for the deluxe binding produced at the Doves Bindery. Adjusted for inflation, that $264 is the equivalent of around $6,800 today.