In May 1891 Mr. William Morris, whose poems and romances had delighted many readers, issued a small quarto book entitled The Story of the Glittering Plain, which had been printed at a press that he had set up in the Upper Mall, Hammersmith.
Lovers of old books could recognise at once that in its arrangement, and, to some extent, in its types, this first-fruit of the Kelmscott Press went straight back to the fifteenth century, resembling most nearly the quartos printed at Venice about 1490. Until within a few years of that date printed books, like the old manuscripts, had dispensed altogether with a title-page. Their first few pages might be occupied with a prologue or a table of contents, and though, when the text was reached, it was usual to herald it with an Incipit or Incomincia, followed by the title of the work, the information as to date of issue, printer or publisher, and place of imprint or sale, which we look to find in the title-page, was only given in a crowning paragraph or colophon at the end of the book, save for one or two accidental instances. The full title-page, as we know it, is not found before about 1520, and did not come into general use, so as to supersede the colophon, until many years after that date. But about 1480 the advantage of getting the short title of the book clearly stated at its outset was becoming pretty generally recognised, and from this date onwards what may be called the label title-page—that is, a first page containing the title and nothing else—is very frequently found. Ten years later a practice occasionally adopted elsewhere became common at Venice, and the first page of the text of a book was decorated with an ornamental border, and occasionally with a little picture as well. It was this temporary fashion which commended itself to Mr. Morris, and The Story of the Glittering Plain was issued with one of these label title-pages and with the first page of the story surrounded by a very beautiful border cut on wood from a design by Mr. Morris himself, here reproduced by the kind permission of his executors. It contained also a number of decorative initial letters, to use the clumsy phrase which the misappropriation of the word capitals to stand for ordinary majuscules, or 'upper case' letters, makes inevitable. Mr. Morris's initials were, of course, true capitals—i.e. they were used to mark the beginnings of chapters, and the only fault that could be found with them was that they were a little too large for the quarto page. These also were from Mr. Morris's own designs, ideas in one or two cases having been borrowed from a set used by Sweynheym and Pannartz, the Germans who introduced printing into Italy; but the borrowing, as always with Mr. Morris, being absolutely free. As for the type, it was clear that it bore some resemblance to that used by Nicolas Jenson, the Frenchman who began printing in Venice in 1470, and whose finer books, especially those on vellum, are generally recognised as the supreme examples of that perfection to which the art of printing attained in its earliest infancy. Mr. Morris's type was as rich as Jenson's at its best, and showed its authorship by not being quite rigidly Roman, some of the letters betraying a leaning to the 'Gothic' or 'black-letter' forms, which had found favour with the majority of the mediæval scribes. At the end of the book came the colophon in due fifteenth-century style, with information as to when and where it was printed. The ornamental design bearing the word 'Kelmscott,' by way of the device or trade-mark without which no fifteenth-century printer thought his office properly equipped, was not used in this book, but speedily made its appearance.
Fig. 38.—The first page of The Story of the Glittering Plain.
Pretty as was this edition of the The Story of the Glittering Plain, it yet raised a doubt—the doubt as to whether there was any real life in this effort to start afresh from old models, or whether it was a mere antiquarian revival and nothing more. The history of printing—or rather of the handwriting which the first printers took as their models—recorded, at least, one instance in which an antiquarian revival had been of permanent service; for the Roman letter, which the printers have used now for four centuries, was itself a happy reversion on the part of the fifteenth-century scribes to the Caroline minuscules of 600 years earlier, which had gradually been debased past recognition. There was no room for a second such sweeping reform as this, but those who compared the best modern printing with the masterpieces of the craft in its early days knew that the modern books by the side of the old ones looked flat and grey; and the new Glittering Plain, though not entirely satisfactory, was certainly free from these faults. A few months later the appearance of the three-volume reprint of Caxton's version of the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, sufficed to show that the Kelmscott Press was capable of turning out a book large enough to tax the resources of a printing-office, and the new book was not only larger but better than its predecessor. It became known that this, but for an accident, should have been the first book issued from the new press; and it was evident that the initial letters were exactly right for this larger page, while the splendid woodcuts from the designs of Sir Edward Burne-Jones revived the old glories of book-illustration. In the Golden Legend also appeared the first of those woodcut frontispiece titles which formed, as far as we know, an entirely new departure, and confer on the Kelmscott books one of their chief distinctions. Printed sometimes in white letters on a background of dark scrollery, sometimes in black letters on a lighter ground, these titles are always surrounded by a border harmonising with that on the first page of text, which they face. They thus carry out Mr. Morris's cardinal principle, that the unit, both for arrangement of type and for decoration, is always the double page. How persistently even the best printers in the trade ignore this principle is known to any one who has asked for a specimen of how a book is to be printed, it being almost impossible to get more than a single page set up. If a double page is insisted on, the craftsman, ingenious in avoiding trouble, will print the same page twice over, thus confusing the eye by the exact parallelism of line with line and paragraph with paragraph. But Mr. Morris, who had all the capacity of genius for taking pains, understood that, when a book lies open before us, though we only read one page at a time, we see two, and in the selection of the type, the adjustment of letterpress and margins, and finally in the pursuit of a decorative beginning, either to the book itself, or to its sections, he never arranged a single page except in relation to the one which it was to face.
As far as permanent influence is concerned Mr. Morris's Roman letter, the 'Golden type,' as it was dubbed, from its use in the Golden Legend, is the most important of the three founts which he employed. His own sympathies, however, were too pronouncedly mediæval for him to be satisfied with it, and for the next large book which he took in hand, a reprint of Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, the first work printed in the English tongue, he designed a much larger and bolder type, an improvement on one of the 'Gothic' founts used by Anton Koberger at Nuremberg in the fifteenth century. This 'Troy' type was subsequently recut in a smaller size for the double-columned Chaucer, and in both its forms is a very handsome fount, while the characters are so clearly and legibly shaped that, despite its antique origin, any child who knows his letters can learn to read it in a few minutes. With these three founts the Kelmscott Press was thoroughly equipped with type; but until his final illness took firm hold on him Mr. Morris was never tired of designing new initials, border-pieces, and decorative titles with a profusion which the old printers, who were parsimonious in these matters, would have thought extravagantly lavish. Including those completed by his executors after his death, he printed in all fifty-three books in sixty-five volumes, and this annual output of nine or ten volumes of all sizes, save the duodecimo, which he refused to recognise, gave his work a cumulative force which greatly increased its influence. Had he printed only a few books his press might have been regarded as a rich man's toy, an outbreak of æstheticism in a new place, of no more permanent interest than the cult of the sunflower and the lily in the 'eighties. Even the great Chaucer by itself might not have sufficed to take his press out of the category of experiments. But when folio, quarto, octavo, and sexto-decimo appeared in quick succession, each with its appropriate decorations, and challenging and defying comparison with the best work of the best printers of the past, the experimental stage was left far behind, and publishers and printers awoke to the fact that a model had been set them which they would do well to imitate.
Fig. 39.—The Kelmscott 'Troy' Type.
As to what will be the permanent result of Mr. Morris's efforts to reform modern printing it is too soon as yet to speak, but signs of their influence are already abundantly visible. The books issued from the 'Vale Press' of Messrs. Ricketts and Shannon have their admirers; but they have that rather irritating degree of likeness which makes every difference—and the differences are numerous—appear a wilful and regrettable divergence.
