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.