IMPORTANT NOTE: We experienced some technical difficulties in recording this episode and at times Ben’s audio is missing or corrupted. I (Eleanor) have done my best to clean this up but please bear with us on this!
Welcome to the third episode of our 2018 summer mini-series, Victorian Adaptations / Adapting the Victorians. Today, we’re going to continue our discussion of Victorian adaptations of medieval culture etc. with a chat about William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer and the Kelmscott press more broadly.
Joining us today to help us talk about the Kelmscott Press and its iconic edition of Chaucer’s works is Ben Maggs of Maggs Bros, one of the largest antiquarian booksellers in the world.
William Morris is actually a novelist as well as the proprietor of a fine press, so we may cover him in more detail at some point. But let’s start with
A Brief Timeline of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press
Born March 24th, 1834
1853 – attends Exeter College
1856 – graduates, gets a job doing architectural stuff
Late 1850s Gets involved with the PRB and starts painting
1859 – marries Jane Burden. The marriage is to be a burden to both.
1879 – moves to Kelmscott house
1884 – becomes a socialist,
November 13, 1887 – marched with George Bernard Shaw during Bloody Sunday
1888 – a lecture by Emery Walker inspires Morris to start a press Walker is actually a huge player in fine press printing, he was involved in the creation of Doves Type, the proprietary face used by Doves Press which was lost when his partner, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson began throwing the type into the Thames secretly over a period of years
1890 – began designing fonts, sourcing paper, publicizing, etc.
1891 – first book, The Story of the Glittering Plain, comes out
1896 – the Kelmscott Chaucer is published
1898 – Kelmscott press closes
Note by William Morris on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press.
I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, & of the earlier printing which took its place. As to the fifteenth-century books I had noticed that they were always Beautiful by the 4th of May typography, even without the added ornament, with which many of them are so lavishly supplied. and it was the essence of my undertaking to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type. looking at my adventure from this point of view then, I found I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the Blinds; and lastly the position of the printed matter on the page.
it was a matter of course that I should consider it necessary that the paper should be handmade, both for the sake of durability and appearance. it would be a very false economy to stint in the quality of the paper as to price: so I had only to think about the kind of handmade paper. On this head I came to two conclusions: 1st, that the paper must be wholly of linen (most handmade papers are off cotton today), and must be quite ‘hard,’ i.e., thoroughly well sized; and 2nd, that, so it must be ‘ laid’ and not ‘ wove’ (i.e. made on a mould made of obvious wires), the lines caused by the wires of the mould must not be too strong, so as to give a ribbed appearance. I found that on these points I was at one with the practice of the papermakers of the fifteenth century; so I took as my model a Bolognese paper of about 1473. my friend Mr bachelor, of Little Chart, Kent, carried out my voice very satisfactorily, & produced from the first the excellent paper which I still use.
Next as to type. By instant rather than by conscious thinking it over, I Began by getting myself a fount of Roman type. And here what I wanted was letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line, which is the Essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. there was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced the completest and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. This type I studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big scale, & drawing it over many times before I Began designing my own letter; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it servilely; in fact, my Roman type, especially in the lower case, tends to be rather more to the gothic than does Jenson’s.
After a while I felt that I must have a gothic as well as a Roman fount; and here in the task I set myself was to redeem the gothic character from the charge of unreadableness which is commonly brought against it. and I felt the discharge could not be reasonably brought against the types of the first two decades of printing: that Schoeffer at Mainz, Mentelin at Strasburg, and Gunther Zainer at Augsburg, avoided the spiky ends and undue compression which lay some of the later type open to the above charge. Only the earlier printers ( naturally following there in the practice of their predecessors the scribes) with very liberal of contractions, and used an excess of ‘tied’ letters, which, by the way, are very useful to the Compositor. so I entirely issues contractions, except for the ’&,’ and had very few tied letters, in fact none but the absolutely necessary ones. Keeping my end steadily in view, I designed a blackletter type which I think I may claim to be as readable as a Roman one, and to say the truth I prefer it to the Roman. This type is of the size called Great Primer (the Roman type is of ‘English’ size); But later on I was driven by the necessities of the Chaucer ( a double-columned book) to get a smaller Gothic type of Pica size.
The punches for all these types, I may mention, were cut for me with great intelligence and skill by Mr E P Price, and render my designs most satisfactorily.
Now as to the spacing: First, the ‘face’ off the letter should be as nearly conterminous with the ‘body’ as possible, so as to avoid undue white between the letters. Next, the lateral spaces between the words should ( a) no more than is necessary to distinguish clearly The Division into, and (b) should be as nearly equal as possible. modern printers, even the best, pay very little heads to these two essentials of seemly composition, and run riot in licentious spacing, thereby producing interalia, those ugly rivers of lines running about the page which are such a blemish to decent printing. Third, the white between the lines should not be excessive; the modern practice of ‘leading’ should be used as little as possible, and Never Without some definite reason, such as marking some special piece of printing. the only leading I have allowed myself is in some cases a ‘ thin’ lead between the lines of my Gothic pica type: in the Chaucer and the double-columned books I have used a ‘hair’ lead, and not even this in the 16mo books. Lastly, but by no means least, comes the position of the printed matter on the page. This should always leave the inner Margin the narrowest, the top somewhat wider, the outside (fore-edge) why does still, and the bottom widest of all. This rule is never departed from in mediaeval books, written all printed. modern printers systemically transgress against it; thus apparently contradicting the fact that the unit of a book is not one page, but a pair of pages. A friend, the librarian of one of our most important private libraries, tells me that after careful testing he has come to the conclusion that the mediaeval rule was to make a difference of 20 per cent, from margin to margin. now these matters of spacing and position or of the greatest importance in the production of beautiful books; if they are properly considered they will make a book printed in quite ordinary type at least decent and pleasant to the eye. The disregard of them will spoil the effect of the best designed type.
It was only natural that I, a decorator by profession, should attempt to ornament my books suitably; about this matter, I will only say that I have always tried to keep in mind the necessity for making my decoration a part of the page of type. I may add that in designing the Magnificent and inimitable wood could switch have adorned several of my books, and will above all a dorm the Chaucer which is now drawing near completion, my friend Sir Edward Burne-Jones has never lost sight of this important point, so that his work will not only give us a series of most beautiful and imaginative books, but form the most harmonious decoration possible to the printed book.
Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith.
Nov 11 1895.
A page of the Dove’s Press Bible Kemscott Press info: https://www.lib.umd.edu/williammorris/kelmscott-press/the-kelmscott-press
Kelmscott Chaucer: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-kelmscott-chaucer
Kelmscott Defense of Guenevere (http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/images/guenevere1892/jpeg/pageflip1-50.html)
Beowulf (check out a spread from their edition here: http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/Images/Beowulf/Beowulf_spread.jpg)
Doves Type:
https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type-revival/
Comentarios