Pickering died in 1854, bankrupt through indorsing notes for a friend. The death of Pickering was a great blow to Whittingham, but the bankruptcy did not in any way involve the Chiswick Press. Whittingham never took the same interest in the business afterward, although the house had become sufficiently strong to continue and maintain its standards. Whittingham was always actuated by the true craftsman’s spirit. He was successful in his business, but he was more anxious for artistic than for financial success. There is not the slightest doubt that if he had been willing to do so he might have amassed a large fortune. Upon one occasion he was called in as an expert to figure the price which the government should offer for a very large contract. Instead of calling for bids the government had a price figured which it proposed to offer for the work. Whittingham figured a price which would be just to the government and at the same time offer a good margin of profit to the contractor. After he had completed his labors, he was offered the contract himself, but refused, stating as he did so that he would rather print fine books than make money. The history of English printing shows one more epoch-making figure. It is that of William Morris, poet, socialist, idealist, and craftsman. Morris is in many ways one of the most picturesque figures of the nineteenth century. Interested in many kinds of craftsmanship, he was particularly interested in printing and in 1891 he set up the Kelmscott Press in order to express his idea of what a book should be. Morris was above all things a man of the Middle Ages. Like the even more famous Ruskin, his spirit revolted from many of the characteristics of the nineteenth century. Whatever he did, thought, or said is influenced by this underlying spirit of mediævalism. In his books and his types we find exhibited the spirit and forms of the fifteenth century, but the vital thing is the spirit and not the form. Although deeply influenced by fifteenth century forms, Morris’s work is not mere imitation. It is rather a reproduction of the old-time spirit. Morris said that in printing it was important to consider “the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, words, and lines, and lastly the position of the printed matter on the page.” The harmony and completeness of the whole, a harmony extending beyond mechanism to the harmony of literary spirit and typographic form, was his fundamental idea. In working this out he adopted as a unit not the single page of type, as had been commonly the case, but the double page, on the ground that when the book is opened we have before our eyes not one page but two, and therefore the two together form a unit of book composition.