English printers' ornaments

by Henry R. Plomer

The first book that came from that press was The Story of the Glittering Plain, one of his own writings, which appeared on April 4, 1891. It was a small quarto printed with the Golden Type, and the issue was limited to 200 ordinary copies and six on vellum.

It was at once evident that Mr Morris had gone back to the fifteenth century for both his type and ornaments. The first page of the text was surrounded by a border designed by Mr Morris himself and showing traces of the Venetian school. It was printed in a specially cast fount of Roman letter, modelled on that of Nicholas Jenson, the printer in Venice, in the fifteenth century. It was not quite rigidly Roman, some of the letters showing a trace of Gothic.

On September 24, 1891, another quarto was issued, Poems by the Way, and during the next twelve months five more books from the Kelmscott Press made their appearance—Love-Lyrics and Songs of Proteus, and other Poems, by Wilfred Blunt; Of the Nature of Gothic, by John Ruskin; William Morris’s Defence of Guenevere, and other poems, followed by the same author’s Dream of John Ball, and in September Caxton’s edition of the Golden Legend, in three large quarto volumes, with woodcuts by Burne-Jones. This was intended to be the first issue of the Press, but was delayed by an accident. The initial letters, which in the earlier books appeared to be somewhat too large for the page, were exactly right in this. Here, too, appeared for the first time the woodcut frontispiece title that afterwards became a feature of the Kelmscott Press. Sometimes these were printed in white letters on a ground of dark scroll-work, sometimes in black letters on a lighter ground, and they were surrounded by a border of the same design as that to the first page of the text, it being William Morris’s principle that the unit, both for arrangement of type and for decoration, is always the double page. The type used in this was the same as that seen in the first production of the Press: but from its use in this book it was afterwards distinguished as the Golden type.

Beautiful as the Golden Legend was as an example of the printer’s craftsmanship, it was immediately followed by another book that eclipsed it, a reprint of Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troy in two volumes in large quarto. For this Morris had designed a new fount of type, a handsome Gothic letter, which recalled that of the fifteenth century printer, Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, and was not unlike a fount of type used by Thomas Berthelet. This type came to be known as the Troy types; but it was not alone the type that attracted attention. The decoration of these two volumes was equally remarkable.

Another book printed in the Troy type was Godefrey of Bologne, and by the courtesy of the Trustees of the Kelmscott Press, one of the borders designed by Morris for this book is here reproduced. The boldness of execution no less than the simplicity of the design and its uniformity with the text, show the skill of the woodcutter. Another notable departure from stereotyped pattern was introduced by Morris. His fleuron became a perfect leaf—a black leaf with white ribs, which took the place of the reversed P or D used for paragraph marks.

The type in which these books were printed was afterwards recut in a smaller size for the folio edition of the works of Chaucer, which issued from the Kelmscott Press in 1895, and with its magnificent illustrations by Burne-Jones, is its crowning glory.

William Morris died in 1896 after he had printed fifty-three books. Short as his career as a printer was, his influence spread in ever-widening circles and still remains with us. In a few words, which cannot be too often quoted, he set out his ideal of what a printer should do and what a printed book should be: “The whole duty of Typography is to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be conveyed by the author. And the whole duty of beautiful typography is not to substitute for the beauty or interest of the thing thought and intended to be conveyed by the symbol a beauty or interest of its own, but on the one hand to win access for that communication by the clearness and beauty of the vehicle, and on the other hand to take advantage of every pause or stage in that communication to interpose some characteristic and restful beauty in its own art.”

In this spirit William Morris’s immediate disciples—Mr Emery Walker, Mr Cobden Sanderson, and Mr St John Hornby—founded the Doves Press and the Ashendene Press.

The Doves Press was founded in 1900 and closed its doors in 1916. In that time was produced a Bible in five quarto volumes, as well as plays of Shakespeare, poems of Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and others, and prose works by John Ruskin and Emerson.

Mr St John Hornby attained success at his Ashendene Press with a fount of Greek adapted from the fount used by the first printers in Italy, but the books produced at these two presses contribute nothing to the history of English Printers’ Ornaments. Apart, however, from the work of the private enthusiasts, the trade as a whole was purified and immensely improved by their example.