Ten years before the close of the nineteenth century display typography was in a chaotic state so far as art was concerned. Printers who before had not doubted the appropriateness and quality of their own typography, began to realize that it lacked something they were not able to supply, and were ready to follow a Moses who could lead them to better things. Then began to form a curious chain of events that was to have a revolutionary influence upon commercial typography as well as upon commercial art. The first link in this chain was the establishing of the Kelmscott Press in England by William Morris.
William Morris was an artist, a poet, a designer and a craftsman. Partiality for things medieval showed itself early in his life, and before he took up printing he manufactured artistic house furnishings in the ruins of an old abbey.
Years ago if the average American citizen were asked what great thing Benjamin Franklin did, his answer might have been, “He invented the Franklin stove.” The average person of today would connect the name of Morris with the Morris chair. As the application of art principles to typography has caused the compositor to turn from rule curving, to set his lines straight, and to seek paper and ink without luster, so the influence of Morris led to a distaste for gilt and polish and trimmings, and created a demand for subdued colors and straight lines in home furnishings. He who can influence others to think and act in manner different and better than they have done before, is truly great.
Morris lived in a picturesque old manor-house in Kelmscott on the Thames in England, and it was there at the age of fifty-seven years that he began to print. He was not a printer by trade, but before a type was set he studied the art from the beginning. He even learned to make a sheet of paper himself. Kelmscott Press paper was made by hand of fine white linen rags untouched by chemicals. Morris as a handicraftsman had an abhorrence for machinery. It is doubtful if he would have used even a hand-press if results equally good could have been obtained without it.
Morris’s idea seems to have been to take up good typography where the early printers left off. When he wanted types for the new printshop he had enlarged photographs made of the type pages of Jenson, Koburger and other printers of the fifteenth century, and from these photographs designed his type-faces, arranging the details of the letters to conform to his own ideas.
His roman type-face he called “Golden,” probably because of its use on the “Golden Legend.” This type-face was afterward reproduced by foundries in America as Jenson, Kelmscott, and other type-names. Morris was wont to say that he considered the glory of the Roman alphabet was in its capitals, but the glory of the Gothic alphabet was in its lower-case letters. He also designed a type-face characteristic of the Gothic letters used by Koburger and other fifteenth-century printers, and, probably because of its use on the “Historyes of Troye,” called it Troy. This type also was reproduced by type foundries, and printers knew it as Satanick and Tell Text.
The space ordinarily assigned to the page margins Morris covered with foliage decoration in the manner of the early Italian printers, large decorative initials blending with the borders. These initials and borders, with few exceptions, were drawn by himself and engraved upon wood by W. H. Hooper. Compare the right-hand page of the two pages here reproduced with the Venetian specimen in the chapter on “The Spread of Typography.”
BUSINESS CARD
As displayed in 1865
One of Morris’s books, an edition of Chaucer, was additionally enriched by upward of a hundred illustrations by Burne-Jones, a noted British artist.