Hammersmith (London, England) -- Imprints; Kelmscott Press; Printing -- Great Britain -- History
The foregoing article was written at the request of a London bookseller
for an American client who was about to read a paper on the Kelmscott
Press. As the Press is now closing, and its seven years' existence will
soon be a matter of history, it seems fitting to set down some other
facts concerning it while they can still be verified; the more so as
statements founded on imperfect information have appeared from time to
time in newspapers and reviews.
As early as 1866 an edition of The Earthly Paradise was projected, which
was to have been a folio in double columns, profusely illustrated by Sir
Edward Burne-Jones, and typographically superior to the books of that
time. The designs for the stories of Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and the
Image, The Ring given to Venus, and the Hill of Venus, were finished,
and forty-four of those for Cupid and Psyche were engraved on wood in
line, somewhat in the manner of the early German masters. About
thirty-five of the blocks were executed by William Morris himself, and
the remainder by George Y. Wardle, G. F. Campfield, C. J. Faulkner, and
Miss Elizabeth Burden. Specimen pages were set up in Caslon type, and in
the Chiswick Press type afterwards used in The House of the Wolfings,
but for various reasons the project went no further. Four or five years
later there was a plan for an illustrated edition of Love is Enough, for
which two initial L's and seven side ornaments were drawn and engraved
by William Morris. Another marginal ornament was engraved by him from a
design by Sir E. Burne-Jones, who also drew a picture for the
frontispiece, which has now been engraved by W. H. Hooper for the final
page of the Kelmscott Press edition of the work. These side ornaments,
three of which appear on the opposite page, are more delicate than any
that were designed for the Kelmscott Press, but they show that when the
Press was started the idea of reviving some of the decorative features
of the earliest printed books had been long in its founder's mind. At
this same period, in the early seventies, he was much absorbed in the
study of ancient manuscripts, and in writing out and illuminating
various books, including a Horace and an Omar Khayyam, which may have
led his thoughts away from printing. In any case, the plan of an
illustrated Love is Enough, like that of the folio Earthly Paradise, was
abandoned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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