William Morris: The Collector’s Guide to First Editions, Rare and Collectible Books

Early Life and the Rejection of Industry

William Morris was born on March 24, 1834, in Walthamstow, Essex, then a rural village on the northeastern edge of London. His father was a wealthy bill broker, and the family lived in comfortable middle-class prosperity. Young Morris grew up riding ponies through Epping Forest and reading the novels of Walter Scott, whose medieval romances implanted a lifelong longing for the pre-industrial past. He entered Exeter College, Oxford, in 1852, intending to take holy orders. At Oxford, he met Edward Burne-Jones, a fellow student with similar artistic inclinations. The two abandoned their religious ambitions and devoted themselves to art, literature, and the dream of reforming Victorian society through beauty. Morris was deeply disturbed by the ugliness of industrial England—the smog-choked cities, the soulless factories, the cheap and shoddy goods produced for the working poor. He began writing poetry, publishing his first collection, The Defence of Guenevere, in 1858, though it sold poorly.

The Founding of the Firm

In 1861, Morris founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., a decorative arts firm dedicated to producing handmade furniture, wallpaper, textiles, stained glass, and other household goods. The partners included Burne-Jones, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the architect Philip Webb. They rejected machine production and Victorian over-ornamentation, instead reviving traditional craftsmanship and medieval design principles. Morris insisted that every object in a home, from the wallpaper to the rug to the bookcase, should be beautiful and honestly made. He designed hundreds of wallpaper and fabric patterns, many still in production today. His famous motto was: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” The firm’s success allowed Morris to devote himself to his many passions: poetry, translation, dyeing, weaving, calligraphy, and political activism. Yet one form of art continued to trouble him: the printed book.

The Kelmscott Press: A Book Arts Revolution

In 1888, Morris delivered a lecture titled “The Ideal Book,” in which he condemned the state of commercial printing. Victorian books were, in his view, typographic horrors: weak fonts, crowded pages, machine-made paper, and cloth bindings that fell apart. Morris resolved to do better. In January 1891, at the age of fifty-six, he founded the Kelmscott Press at a small cottage near his country home, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. He named the press after the manor, his beloved retreat. Morris personally designed two typefaces based on fifteenth-century Venetian and German models: the Roman-inspired “Golden Type” and the Gothic-inspired “Troy Type.” He also designed elaborate floral borders, initial letters, and title pages, drawing from medieval manuscripts and early printed books. He chose hand-made paper from a specialist mill in Hampshire, and he insisted on hand-binding in vellum or heavy boards. Every aspect of production was controlled by his aesthetic vision.

The first book from the Kelmscott Press was The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), a prose romance written by Morris himself. Over the next seven years, the press produced fifty-two books, plus a few ephemeral items. The crown of the enterprise was the Kelmscott Chaucer (1896), a magnificent edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones. The book contained eighty-seven woodcut illustrations, elaborate borders, and a title page of breathtaking complexity. It took two years to print, required multiple presses running simultaneously, and cost a fortune. Only 425 copies were produced, each selling for twenty guineas—roughly a year’s wages for a working-class family. Today, the Kelmscott Chaucer is considered one of the most beautiful books ever printed, a landmark of fine press printing that inspired the private press movement across Europe and America.

The Socialist and the Craftsman

Morris did not see Kelmscott as a retreat from politics. He had joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883 and later founded the Socialist League, believing that industrial capitalism was the enemy of good art. The Kelmscott Press was not a commercial enterprise but a demonstration. Morris wanted to prove that beautiful books could be made by hand, and that the work of making them could bring joy to the craftsman. He wrote his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) while planning the press, imagining a future where such handcraft was the norm rather than the exception. He was realistic about the press’s limitations: it could never reach the masses. But it could inspire a revival. He was right.

Influence and Legacy

William Morris died on October 3, 1896, in London, just months after the Kelmscott Chaucer was completed. He was sixty-two years old. The press closed shortly after his death. Its influence, however, spread across the Atlantic and the Channel. The American private press movement, including the Ashendene, Doves, and Golden Cockerel presses, all traced their lineage to Kelmscott. Later fine printers such as Bruce Rogers, Frederic Goudy, and the partners at the Officina Bodoni acknowledged Morris as their inspiration. Beyond printing, Morris’s broader vision—that art should be integrated into daily life, that beauty is a moral necessity, that the worker deserves joy in labor—influenced the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Bauhaus, and modern design education. And his fantasy prose romances laid the groundwork for J. R. R. Tolkien and the entire genre of high fantasy. William Morris was a poet, a painter, a weaver, a socialist, a dreamer, and above all, a printer who believed that a book could be a work of art.

The Kelmscott Press – Published books: 1891-1898

Bibliography of books published by the Kelmscott Press during its existence. Does not include his unpublished works produced after his death.

Gallery of William Morris & The Kelmscott Press Works

Samples of books and designs published by the Kelmscott Press.

Reference:

• A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press by William S. Peterson, 1985