In quest of the perfect book

by William Dana Orcutt

The decoration for the first page was finished in March, 1893. Morris was entirely satisfied with it, exclaiming, “My eyes! how good it is!” Then he laid the whole project aside for over a year, while he devoted himself to his metrical version of Beowulf. In the meantime Burne-Jones was experiencing great difficulty in having his designs satisfactorily translated onto wood, and Morris dolefully remarked, after comparing notes with his friend and collaborator, “We shall be twenty years at this rate in getting it out!”

It was June, 1894, before the great work was fairly under way. “Chaucer getting on well,” Morris notes in his diary,—“such lovely designs.” At the end of June he records his expectation of beginning the actual printing within a month, and that in about three months more all the pictures and nearly all the borders would be ready for the whole of the Canterbury Tales.

About this time Morris was asked if he would accept the poet-laureateship of England, made vacant by Tennyson’s death, if offered to him, and he unhesitatingly declined. His health and strength were noticeably failing, yet at the beginning of 1895, less than two years before his death, he was completely submerged by multifarious occupations. Two presses were running upon the Chaucer and still a third upon smaller books. He was designing new paper hangings and writing new romances; he was collaborating in the translation of Heimskringla and was supervising its production for the Saga Library; he was engaged in getting together his splendid collection of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts.

It was not all smooth sailing with the Chaucer. In 1895 Morris discovered that many of the sheets had become discolored by some unfortunate ingredient of the ink, but to his immense relief he succeeded in removing the yellow stains by bleaching. “The check of the Chaucer,” he writes, “flattens life for me somewhat, but I am going hard into the matter, and in about a fortnight hope to know the worst of it.”

In December the Chaucer was sufficiently near completion to encourage him to design a binding for it. Even here he found another difficulty. “Leather is not good now,” he complained; “what used to take nine months to cure is now done in three. They used to say ‘What’s longest in the tanyard stays least time in the market,’ but that no longer holds good. People don’t know how to buy now; they’ll take anything.”

Morris’ anxiety over the Chaucer increased as it came nearer to completion. “I’d like it finished tomorrow!” he exclaimed. “Every day beyond tomorrow that it isn’t done is one too many.” To a visitor, looking through the printed sheets in his library, who remarked upon the added beauty of those sheets that follow the Canterbury Tales, where the picture pages face one another in pairs, Morris exclaimed in alarm, “Now don’t you go saying that to Burne-Jones or he’ll be wanting to do the first part over again; and the worst of that would be that he’d want to do all the rest over again because the other would be so much better, and then we should never get done, but be always going round and round in a circle.”

The daily progress of the work upon the Chaucer was the one interest that sustained his waning energies. The last three blocks were brought to him on March 21, 1896. The Easter holidays almost killed him. “Four mouldy Sundays in a mouldy row,” he writes in his diary. “The press shut and Chaucer at a standstill.”

On May 6 all the picture sheets were printed and the block for the title page was submitted for Morris’ approval, the final printing being completed two days later. On June 2 the first two bound copies were delivered to him, one of which he immediately sent to Burne-Jones, the other he placed in his own library.

Thus the Kelmscott Chaucer came to completion. Four months later William Morris was dead. The Chaucer had been nearly five years in preparation and three and a half years in execution. The printing alone had consumed a year and nine months. The volumes contain, besides eighty-seven illustrations by Burne-Jones, a full-page woodcut title, fourteen large borders, eighteen frames for pictures, and twenty-six large initial words, all designed by Morris, together with the smaller initials and the design for binding, which was in white pigskin with silver clasps, executed by Douglas Cockerell.