The Kelmscott Press


In 1884, the same year in which the Hobby Horse was established, a group of individuals concerned with crafts revival established a guild called the Art Workers Guild. A splinter group formed in 1888 when the Art Workers Guild’s activities expanded. This group’s name was the Combined Arts Society that planned to sponsor exhibitions and Walter Crane was voted as their first president. By October of 1888, when they opened their first exhibition, the name had changed to the Arts And Crafts Society. Lectures started that same year. William Morris lectured in Tapestry weaving, Walter Crane handled design and Emery Walker enlightened students on book design and printing.

Emery Walker was ‘n huge advocator of unity in design. He lectured to his students that “ornament, whatever it is, picture or pattern work, should form part of the page; should be part of the whole scheme of the book.” He associated book design with architecture, for only careful planning of every aspect could result in design unity. He specifies the elements that need to be considered as being the paper, ink, type, spacing, margins, illustrations and ornaments.

In 1888 William Morris started working on typefaces inspired by incunabula types. He enlarged them five times and traced over them numerous timed until reached a design that was a Morris original but still possessed the aesthetic of incunabula. He finalized his first typeface, called Golden, in 1890. It is based on Venetian Roman faces designed by Nicholas Jenson in the years 1470 and 1476. Type founding for Golden started in December 1890 when workmen were hired by Morris and an old hand press was rescued from a printer’s storeroom. These were set up in Morris’s cottage near the Kelmscott Manor in Hammersmith. This led to Morris to naming his enterprise the Kelmscott Press.

William Morris, Golden typeface, 1888 ‑ 90.
This font inspired renewed interest in Venetian and Old Style typography    

This press was committed to recapturing the beauty of incunabula books. Its books were characterized by meticulous hand printing, hand-made paper and hand cut woodblocks, initials and borders.  The Kelmscott Press strongly rejected the mass-production craze of the Industrial Revolution and strived to revive the vintage and more personal methods of book production. The Kelmscott Press’s first production was The Story of the Glittering Plain in 1894. It was produced by William Morris and designed by Walter Crane. 200 copies were produced on paper and 6 on vellum.

Morris designed a remarkably legible blackletter typeface for The Story of the Glittering Plain, called Troy, by carefully studying incunabula Gothic types. The characters of this typeface were wider than traditional gothic types. Morris also increased the differences between similar characters and also made curved characters rounder.

William Morris (designer) and Walter Crane (illustrator), title‑page 
spread for The Story of the Glittering Plain, 1894.
Operating on his compulsion to ornament the total space,
 Morris created a luminous range of contrasting values.
William Hooper was the master craftsman who made the woodengravings of Morris’s borders and initials. These were always perfectly compatible with Morris’s types and the drawings done by Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane and C.M. Gere.
Morris designed 644 blocks for initials, borders, frames and title pages for the Kelmscott Press. He designed these by, firstly, lightly sketching the main lines in pencil. Then, using white paint and black ink, he worked back and forth, painting the background in black and the pattern in white over it. The entire final design would be developed through this fluent process, for Morris believes that “meticulous copying of a preliminary drawing squeezed the life from a work.”

The most outstanding and ambitious volume produced by the Kelmscott was the 556 page The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. It took 4 years to make. It had 87 woodblock illustrations done by Burne-Jones and 14 large borders and 18 smaller frames done by Morris. Morris also designed over 200 initial letters and words for this publication that was printed in red and black in large folio size. Like this book, Morris’s books achieved a harmonious whole with their meticulously designed typographic pages.
Morris passed away in 1896 and the disbanding of the Kelmscott Press followed two years later in 1898.
William Morris, illustrated page from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1896.
A system of types, initials, borders, and illustrations were combined to create the dazzling Kelmscott style    
William Morris left this world with a legacy of ironies associated with his name. For instance, Morris sought refuge in past designs but his design attitudes that he developed charted the future. He taught that design could bring art to the working class but, ironically enough, the products produced by Morris & Company and the Kelmscott Press were only available to the wealthy. Morris was a crusader for handicraft but his inspiration filtered into commercial printing. The last, but certainly not the least influential, irony is that Morris returned to incunabula printing methods but he applied basic aspects of industrial production to the printed pages of his Kelmscott books in the form of interchangeable and repeatable frames and borders.

The influence of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press upon graphic design, especially book design, was not only evident in the direct stylistic imitation of the Kelmscott borders, initials and typefaces. Morris’s concepts of well-made books, beautiful typeface designs based on earlier models and his sense of design unity, with the smallest detail relating to the total concept, inspired a whole new generation of book designers. His means of studying and reexamining earlier typefaces and graphic design history ignited and energetic redesign process that resulted in major improvements in the quality and variety of fonts available for design and printing. 

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