The Subscribers Stayed

On 14 November 1894, people who had ordered William Morris’s edition of Chaucer were offered a way out. The book was growing. More pictures by Edward Burne-Jones were going in, and the number of paper copies would rise from 325 to 425. Subscribers could cancel their orders if they wished.

According to Sydney Cockerell, who helped run the Kelmscott Press, none withdrew. The additional copies found buyers too. By December, the paper edition was sold out, although most of the printing still lay ahead.

These readers were committing £20 to a book they could not yet take home. What eventually arrived in 1896 was The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: medieval English poetry in a large volume whose lettering, pictures and climbing borders had been made to belong together. Producing that apparent unity required decisions to pass through a considerable number of hands.

The book before the press

Morris was already a poet, designer and manufacturer when he established the press in Hammersmith, west London, in 1891. His interest in books went well beyond furnishing them with patterns. He had studied early printing, collected medieval manuscripts and tried making handwritten books himself. As a socialist, he also argued for useful, pleasurable work in a society very different from the one that bought his furnishings.

Printing offered a particular problem. A book might contain attractive drawings and still be badly made as a book. Type could be thin, spacing uneven, margins thoughtless. Morris wanted ordinary operations—setting words, choosing paper, arranging a pair of pages—to carry the design.

His friend Emery Walker supplied an essential aid. Enlarged photographs of early type allowed Morris to study letters at a scale much larger than the finished print. Edward Prince, an experienced punchcutter, then translated his designs into the steel punches from which printing type could be made. Morris could draw a letter; Prince had to make it reproducible in metal.

The practical organisation began modestly. The retired printer William Bowden worked as both compositor, setting type, and pressman. His son W. H. Bowden joined him in February 1891. The workshop subsequently employed people whose names seldom accompany the book in a display case: compositor Jane Pyne and pressman Thomas Binning among them.

In a recollection published by H. Halliday Sparling in 1924, the younger Bowden remembered Morris helping to distribute type back into its cases—and putting it into the wrong compartments. Morris’s enthusiasm was more immediately useful when he returned with two bottles of wine to celebrate the start. The designer was entering a trade whose small routines other people already knew.

Chaucer, the fourteenth-century author of The Canterbury Tales, became the press’s most elaborate undertaking. His verse needed room for long narrative poems, pictures and ornament without turning each page into a crowded miscellany. The first trials exposed a difficulty before the great volume was properly under way.

A smaller letter

In January 1892, trials set passages from the Cook’s Tale and Sir Thopas in two columns using Morris’s Gothic Troy type. The result was too large. Prince cut a smaller version, called Chaucer, and a trial page of the Knight’s Tale in July accommodated 58 lines in each column.

Reducing the type changed how much poetry a page could hold. It also changed the balance between verse and the drawings that Burne-Jones, Morris’s longstanding friend and collaborator, would supply. The book needed to be planned at the size in which people would actually read it.

For all its medieval appearance, Morris intended his lettering to be read. He avoided the profusion of contractions found in some early printing and used few combined letters. He wanted close, regular spacing within and between words, without conspicuous white channels running down a paragraph. The work of the compositor mattered at the scale of the gap between two pieces of type.

Margins worked at a larger scale. Morris treated the facing pair of pages as the design’s unit. The narrowest margins lay at the binding; the spaces grew towards the top, outer edge and foot. In the open volume, the two blocks of text could sit together within a more generous surrounding field.

The words were not an imitation medieval text assembled for decorative purposes. F. S. Ellis edited the volume using the work of Chaucer scholar W. W. Skeat. The scholarly notes and apparatus were left out. Readers received the poetry in its older spelling, rather than a page shared between verse and academic commentary.

From pencil to printable wood

The first page of the General Prologue brought these operations together. Morris rejected an initial border on 1 February 1893. Three days later he began its replacement, a vine pattern completed in about a week. W. H. Hooper engraved the border, the great opening word Whan, two lines of heading and the frame around the picture as one woodblock. The picture itself was cut separately.

That division is easy to miss in the finished page. The plant growth, heading and enclosure had to fit a picture made through a different sequence of work, and both had to meet the columns of metal type below. A specimen of the page was exhibited and sent to booksellers in 1893; the first sheet of the book was not printed until 8 August 1894.

Burne-Jones’s pencil drawings could not simply be laid on the press. Robert Catterson-Smith redrew most of them in ink, with some undertaken by Charles Fairfax Murray. Burne-Jones revised the drawings. They were transferred photographically to wood, giving the engraver a working image to cut. Hooper engraved all 87 illustrations in the completed Chaucer.

Hooper’s cuts preserved black lines and shapes that would take ink, with the intervening spaces cut away. In printing, the surviving surface met the paper at the same level as the tops of the type. The drawing had become a relief printing surface. Elsewhere in the press’s work, repeating ornaments could be reproduced as metal electrotypes; the medieval effect did not require every repeated flourish to be a newly cut wooden original.

The increase in illustrations was part of the change reported to subscribers. In December 1892 the announced book had been expected to contain about 60 Burne-Jones designs. By November 1894 the count had passed 70. It would reach 87 before the book was finished, accompanied by Morris’s borders, picture frames and decorated opening words.

Two people at the press

Paper had to be prepared for this particular burden of ink and pressure. Joseph Batchelor supplied handmade linen paper from Little Chart in Kent. The Chaucer stock was larger and stouter than that used for the press’s other books, and carried a watermark of a perch with a sprig in its mouth. The first two reams arrived in February 1893.

Morris’s requirements were practical as well as visual. The paper needed a firm surface; its laid pattern, made by the wires in the papermaking mould, should not intrude too strongly. Large dark pictures and small letters would share it. Ink had to print both without filling the narrow white spaces between lines.

A hand press brought these surfaces together by pressure from a flat plate. A hinged frame carried the paper above the inked type and blocks; its packing helped distribute the impression. A second, cut-out frame protected areas that should remain clean. The bed rolled beneath the plate, and the pressman pulled the handle to apply pressure. The frame could then be opened and the printed sheet lifted away.

In the modern demonstration below, Amelia Fontanel works with a second operator at the surviving Kelmscott/Goudy Albion press. One handles the ink, the other the clean paper. The film makes the sequence visible, although its rubber rollers, ink and some packing materials belong to present-day practice.

A closer look · 9:03 · English

Working the Kelmscott/Goudy Albion press

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The Chaucer occupied two presses almost exclusively from January 1895. A book that combined red and black printing, densely cut illustrations and carefully positioned borders left substantial work between an approved design and a saleable copy. The printer had to reproduce the relationship again on the next sheet.

The price limited who could own the result. Alongside the 425 paper copies at £20, thirteen were printed on vellum at 120 guineas each. Most copies had a comparatively plain half-holland binding; the elaborate white pigskin bindings associated with some surviving examples were a separate option. This was a costly private-press edition, even though Morris wanted beauty and pleasure in work to extend far beyond wealthy collectors.

The title page was among the last parts made. Morris began it in mid-February 1896 and finished the design on 27 February; Hooper cut it in March. Printing was completed on 8 May. On 2 June, Morris and Burne-Jones received the first two copies. The subscribers who had kept their orders could finally receive theirs when the book was issued on 26 June.