The Kelmscott Press

The Kelmscott Press.
The year 1891 marks the beginning of the last project realized by William Morris, the printing of fine books. His admiration for the medieval illuminated books and the early printed books was strong and he had wanted to produce fine books for quite some time. The revival of the art of the early printers, William Caxton and others. The book could be again an object of art. Nothing like the ones published currently in those years, poor printing, poor binding and low quality paper.A lecture on books design given by Emery Walker in 1888 before the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, London, was probably the stronger motivation for Morris' printing project and led to the establishment of the Kelmscott Press. One month after that lecture Morris was already designing new fonts of type; his first set of type was based on the roman type based on the works of Nicolas Jenson. He worked on enlarged photographs of the Jenson’s type; he made and remade enlarged drawings, corrected and perfected them. At the end steel punches were made from those drawings and carefully revised. By December 1890 the punches for this first type were ready and the founding of the characters began; the font was call Golden. Later Morris designed other two types: the Troy and the Chaucer, being this last one approximately a smaller version of the Troy.
The first book to be printed was Caxton’s translation of The Golden Legend of Voragine. He had installed a hand press in a cottage near his house in Hammersmith and commissioned hand made paper. But the paper was not the right size and the book was too large and would take time; Morris was anxious to start printing and instead he chose a shorter story of his composition call The Story of the Glittering Plain. The first page was pressed on January 31, 1891. It was the beginning of the private press movement in England.William Morris considered the Kelmscott Press his private project for his enjoyment and at his expenses. Twenty copies were printed of that first booklet for distribution in between his friends. Later two hundred copies on paper and six on vellum were printed for sale. The book had one border and twenty decorated initials.Like all William Morris creations and projects the Kelmscott Press was to create beautiful object in limited quantity, his books were really expensive and made for the selected class that could afford them. A second book followed that year, Poems by the Way printed in 300 exemplars. The work for the Story of Glittering Plain had already started, but because of his length it was the seventh book to be published. With it Morris’ stile for all his book was already established, Woodcut borders and initials designed by himself and illustrations by Burne-Jones, Walter Crane and Charles March Gere.
In its seven years of existence the Kelmscott Press produced 53 titles for a total of 18,234 volumes. The press closed two years after William morris death.

VCD302 - Research - A brief history of printing

Printing, in the only sense with which we are at present concerned, differs from most if not from all the arts and crafts represented in the Exhibition in being comparatively modern. For although the Chinese took impressions from wood blocks engraved in relief for centuries before the wood-cutters of the Netherlands, by a similar process, produced the block books, which were the immediate predecessors of the true printed book, the invention of moveable metal letters in the middle of the fifteenth century may justly be considered as the invention of the art of printing. And it is worth mention in passing that, as an example of fine typography, the earliest book printed with movable types, the Gutenberg, or "forty-two line Bible" of about 1455, has never been surpassed.
Printing, then, for our purpose, may be considered as the art of making books by means of movable types. Now, as all books not primarily intended as picture-books consist principally of types composed to form letterpress, it is of the first importance that the letter used should be fine in form; especially as no more time is occupied, or cost incurred, in casting, setting, or printing beautiful letters than in the same operations with ugly ones. And it was a matter of course that in the Middle Ages, when the craftsmen took care that beautiful form should always be a part of their productions whatever they were, the forms of printed letters should be beautiful, and that their arrangement on the page should be reasonable and a help to the shapeliness of the letters themselves. The Middle Ages brought calligraphy to perfection, and it was natural therefore that the forms of printed letters should follow more or less closely those of the written character, and they followed them very closely. The first books were printed in black letter, i.e. the letter which was a Gothic development of the ancient Roman character, and which developed more completely and satisfactorily on the side of the "lower-case" than the capital letters; the "lower-case" being in fact invented in the early Middle Ages. The earliest book printed with movable type, the aforesaid Gutenberg Bible, is printed in letters which are an exact imitation of the more formal ecclesiastical writing which obtained at that time; this has since been called "missal type," and was in fact the kind of letter used in the many splendid missals, psalters, etc., produced by printing in the fifteenth century. On the whole, except in Italy, Gothic letter was most often used, a very few years saw the birth of Roman character not only in Italy, but in Germany and France. In 1465 Sweynheim and Pannartz began printing in the monastery of Subiaco near Rome, and used an exceedingly beautiful type, which is indeed to look at a transition between Gothic and Roman, but which must certainly have come from the study of the twelfth or even the eleventh century MSS. They printed very few books in this type, three only; but in their very first books in Rome, beginning with the year 1468, they discarded this for a more completely Roman and far less beautiful letter. The Roman type of all these printers is similar in character, and is very simple and legible, and unaffectedlydesigned for use; but it is by no means without beauty. It must be said that it is in no way like the transition type of Subiaco, and though more Roman than that, yet scarcely more like the complete Roman type of the earliest printers of Rome.
A further development of the Roman letter took place at Venice. John of Spires and his brother Vindelin, followed by Nicholas Jenson, began to print in that city, 1469, 1470; their type is on the lines of the German and French rather than of the Roman printers. Of Jenson it must be said that he carried the development of Roman type as far as it can go: his letter is admirably clear and regular, but at least as beautiful as any other Roman type. After his death in the "fourteen eighties," or at least by 1490, printing in Venice had declined very much; and though the famous family of Aldus restored its technical excellence, rejecting battered letters, and paying great attention to the "press work" or actual process of printing, yet their type is artistically on a much lower level than Jenson's, and in fact they must be considered to have ended the age of fine printing in Italy.
Jenson, however, had many contemporaries who used beautiful type, some of which - as, e.g., that of Jacobus Rubeus or Jacques le Rouge - is scarcely distinguishable from his. It was these great Venetian printers, together with their brethren of Rome, Milan, Parma, and one or two other cities, who produced the splendid editions of the Classics, which are one of the great glories of the printer's art, and are worthy representatives of the eager enthusiasm for the revived learning of that epoch. By far the greater part of these Italian printers, it should be mentioned, were Germans or Frenchmen, working under the influence of Italian opinion and aims.
It must be understood that through the whole of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth centuries the Roman letter was used side by side with the Gothic. Even in Italy most of the theological and law books were printed in Gothic letter, which was generally more formally Gothic than the printing of the German workmen, many of whose types, indeed, like that of the Subiaco works, are of a transitional character. This was notably the case with the early works printed at Ulm, and in a somewhat lesser degree at Augsburg. In fact Gunther Zeiner's first type (afterwards used by Schussler) is remarkably like the type of the before-mentioned Subiaco books.
In the Low Countries and Cologne, which were very fertile of printed books, Gothic was the favourite. The characteristic Dutch type, as represented by the excellent printer Gerard Leew, is very pronounced and uncompromising Gothic. This type was introduced into England by Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's successor, and was used there with very little variation all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and indeed into the eighteenth. Most of Caxton's own types are of an earlier character, though they also much resemble Flemish or Cologne letter. After the end of the fifteenth century the degradation of printing, especially in Germany and Italy, went on apace; and by the end of the sixteenth century there was no really beautiful printing done: the best, mostly French or Low-Country, was neat and clear, but without any distinction; the worst, which perhaps was the English, was a terrible falling-off from the work of the earlier presses; and things got worse and worse through the whole of the seventeenth century, so that in the eighteenth printing was very miserably performed. In England about this time, an attempt was made (notably by Caslon, who started business in London as a type-founder in 1720) to improve the letter in form. Caslon's type is clear and neat, and fairly well designed; he seems to have taken the letter of the Elzevirs of the seventeenth century for his model: type cast from his matrices is stillin everyday use.
In spite, however, of his praiseworthy efforts, printing had still one last degradation to undergo. The seventeenth century founts were bad rather negatively than positively. But for the beauty of the earlier work they might have seemed tolerable. It was reserved for the founders of the later eighteenth century to produce letters which are positively ugly, and which, it may be added, are dazzling and unpleasant to the eye owing to the clumsy thickening and vulgar thinning of the lines: for the seventeenth-century letters are at least pure and simple in line. The Italian, Bodoni, and the Frenchman, Didot, were the leaders in this luckless change, though our own Baskerville, who was at work some years before them, went much on the same lines; but his letters, though uninteresting and poor, are not nearly so gross and vulgar as those of either the Italian or the Frenchman.
With this change the art of printing touched bottom, so far as fine printing is concerned, though paper did not get to its worst till about 1840. The Chiswick press in 1844 revived Caslon's founts, printing for Messrs. Longman the Diary of Lady Willoughby. This experiment was so far successful that about 1850 Messrs. Miller and Richard of Edinburgh were induced to cut punches for a series of "old style" letters. These and similar founts, cast by the above firm and others, have now come into general use and are obviously a great improvement on the ordinary "modern style" in use in England, which is in fact the Bodoni type a little reduced in ugliness. The design of the letters of this modern "old style" leaves a good deal to be desired, and the whole effect is a little too grey, owing to the thinness of the letters. It must be remembered, however, that most modern printing is done by machinery on soft paper, and not by the hand press, and these somewhat wiry letters are suitable for the machine process, which would not do justice to letters of more generous design.
It is discouraging to note that the improvement of the last fifty years is almost wholly confined to Great Britain. Here and there a book is printed in France or Germany with some pretension to good taste, but the general revival of the old forms has made no way in those countries. Italy is contentedly stagnant. America has produced a good many showy books, the typography, paper, and illustrations of which are, however, all wrong, oddity rather than rational beauty and meaning being apparently the thing sought for both in the letters and the illustrations.
To say a few words on the principles of design in typography: it is obvious that legibility is the first thing to be aimed at in the forms of the letters; this is best furthered by the avoidance of irrational swellings and spiky projections, and by the using of careful purity of line.

William Morris & the Kelmscott Press

William Morris was a printer, artist, designer, writer and editor. In 1891 he set up the Kelmscott Press in Hammersmith, London. His adviser and associate in the press was Emery Walker, an English engraver and printer who was one of the most versatile designers, and one of the best typographic scholars, ever to work in England. Edward Prince, a punchcutter chosen by Walker, cut the three types – Golden, Chaucer and Troy – that Morris designed.Morris preached a doctrine of interdependent factors in bookmaking: type, paper, ink, imposition and impression must be considered together. He regarded two facing pages as the unit. His edition of Chaucer, illustrated by his Oxford friend, Edward Burne-Jones, is one of his most highly prized books. Along with his contemporaries, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson with the Doves Press and Charles Ricketts with the Vale Press, Morris called attention to the inherent qualities of all typography and to the basic nature of letterpress printing in particular. He demonstrated that a typographer does not need endless sizes of type, but he needs consistency. It is not the amount of ornament that enhances and gives variety to a page of type, it is the harmony between the two. Above all, he taught those who were interseted to learn the value of reexamining the past and to profit by it.

The Doves Press

In 1900, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and William Morris' former associate, Emery Walker, established the Doves Press, only a few steps from the old Kelmscott premises (Morris died in 1896). All of these presses had special type designed for them, and in each case the punches were cut by Edward Prince of London, who had also cut the Kelmscott faces. The Doves Press type differs markedly from the others. Like Morris' Golden Type, it draws its inspiration chiefly from the roman of Nicolas Jenson, but the Doves Roman posseses, like its model, a deep simplicity which Morris' type does not. It is a modern type, in the same sense that the paintings of Paul Cézanne (who died in 1906) are modern paintings. Morris, like his friend D.G. Rossetti, remained to the end of his life something other than a modern. He remained what art historians call a Pre-Raphaelite.(Here it is necessary to explain that, in older books about typography, the term "modern" is often used in another sense. It is used to mean "Romantic" – i.e., type such as Bodoni's and Firmin Didot's. This outdated terminology is based on a somewhat simplistic division of type into "old style" – meaning Renaissance or Baroque – and "modern" – meaning Romantic. In the nineteenth century, when Romantic type was new, such terminology made a kind of sense. It makes much more sense now to speak about typography in the same terms used for all the other arts.)

The U.S.: Daniel Berkeley Updike & Bruce Rogers

The Merrymount Press was established in Boston in 1893 by Daniel Berkeley Updike, one of America's most distinguished and able printers. His two great achievements were the operation of his press as a commercial establishment with impeccable standards, and his book entitled Printing Types: Their History, Forms and Use. The most important American typographer for the early twentieth century was undoubtedly Bruce Rogers, who for a time was an associate of Updike's. In 1896 he became director of the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a subsidiary of the publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin. Later, he became the very prototype of the modern freelance typographer. (In doing so, however, he was actually reenacting a Renaissance form. Francesco Griffo and Robert Granjon had worked on the same pattern.)In his three-score years of book designing, Rogers worked for many publishers, including the university presses of Cambridge and Oxford. In 1935 he designed his Oxford Lectern Bible. Rogers was also associated for a number of years with the admirable Printing House of William Rudge, at Mt Vernon, New York , and in England he worked with Emery Walker. He designed two typefaces, Montaigne (1901), and Centaur (1914). The latter is his masterpiece. It is based, like the Doves Roman, on the work of Nicolas Jenson, and like the Doves Roman, it transforms its fifteenth-century model into a new and modern type.