William Morris is an ironic figure. His achievements not only missed their mark, but hit marks he was not aiming at. His printing is no exception. The masterpieces of the Kelmscott Press which he aimed at making "useful pieces of goods" were typographical curiosities from birth, and so far removed from the common way of readers that they have become models of what a book should not be.
He was a Bibliophile, or more exactly, a typophile whose affections became unruly in the presence of decorated incunabula, and, although he was outwardly correct towards pure printing, his heart was not there. According to Sir Sydney Cockerell he flirted with the idea of a folio edition of The Earthly Paradise, "profusely illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones," a quarter of a century before the inception of the Kelmscott Press. His personal taste was much the same then as later, although he continued to pay homage to good as distinct from fine printing. It was the "essence of my undertaking," he said, "to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type." Thus inspired by the example of "the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and the earlier printing which took its place," and in spite of his passion for decorated books he observed that the early printed books "were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament with which many of them are so lavishly supplied."
Much has been made of the emphasis he laid upon the book as an organic assembly of paper, type, and binding. But although few printers or publishers in the nineteenth century had insisted upon the excellence of these ingredients, as he did, the architectonic principle had never been wholly ignored. But in the main it was unconsciously observed. Deliberation is evident in the construction of the Pickering books, in the Keepsakes and Table Books of the thirties and forties, in the illustrated books of the sixties, and the later productions of the Daniel Press; and, if we may leave England for a moment, in such convenient publications as those of Bernhard Tauchnitz, where there is rectitude to satisfy the demands of the most austere of functionalists.
It was not, then, the architectonics of the Kelmscott books which evoked a typographical revolution. Nor was it the pursuit of beauty which always haunted Morris's intentions. "I began printing books," he said, "in the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty." Many printers and publishers of the time would have claimed as much. Bad taste in the arts and crafts is invariably the result of beauty-mongering, and the more costly books of the nineteenth century are littered with beauty from cover to cover.
Neither was it originality. Morris never sought to be original. He was a revivalist, and all his work is derivative. There is nothing new even in that, for all the arts and crafts are derivative, and originality is apt to be a myth and often a nuisance. Morris was even less original than many other earnest innovators, and the Kelmscott books are derivatives twice removed. They are modern variations of the early printed books of northern Europe, as they in turn were but mechanical imitations of the manuscripts which preceded the invention of movable types.
Nor again was there anything peculiar even in that, for all mechanical evolution seems to proceed in the same manner. The earliest railway carriages followed the lines of the stage-coach; the earliest steamships were schooners and brigantines with funnels and paddle-boxes; and the earliest motor-car was a horseless-carriage complete with tail-board. It is not surprising to learn that the earliest printed books were imitations of manuscripts, but it is surprising to find a nineteenth-century printer of genius imitating the imitations.
A page from Poems By The Way, written by Morris and set in the Kelmscott Golden type. This small quarto was the first book printed at the Press in two colors, black and red. Issued in October, 1891, in an edition of 300 copies on paper and 13 on vellum.