tastes. As long before as 1866 he had planned a folio edition of The Earthly Paradise with woodcut illustrations to be designed by Burne-Jones, and printed in a more or less medi?val fa

generous in form, solid in line, without "preposterous thicks and thins," and not compressed laterally, "as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies." After he had drawn his letters on a large scale he had them reduced by photography to the working size and revised them carefully before submitting them to the typecutter. How minute was his attention to detail is shown in the little reproduction of one of his corrected letters with the accompanying notes. This first type of his, having been founded on the old Roman letters, is of course Roman in character and is very clear and beautiful in form. The strong broad letters designed on "something like a square" make easy reading, and there is nothing about the appearance of the attractive page to suggest archaism. The fount, consisting of eighty-one designs including stops, figures, and tied letters, was completed about the beginning of 1891, and on the 12th of January in that year, a cottage was taken at number 16 Upper Mall, near the Kelmscott House, a compositor and a pressman were engaged, and the Kelmscott Press began its career. The new type, which Morris called the "regenerate" or "Jenson-Morris" type, received its formal name, "Golden type," from Caxton's Golden Legend, which Morris had intended to reprint as the first work of the Press, and which was undertaken as soon as The Glittering Plain was

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ok, facing each other as it is opened, should be considered a unit, the edge of the margin that is bound in should be the smallest of the four edges, the top should be somewhat wider, and the front edge wider still, and the tail widest of all. The respective measurements of the most important of the Kelmscott books are, one inch for the inner margin, one and three-eighths inches for the head margin, two and three-quart

KELMSCOTT

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and was the outcome of careful study of the beautiful types of Peter Schoeffer of Mainz, Gunther Zainer of Augsburg, and Anthony Koburger of Nuremberg. It was Gothic in character, but Morris strove to redeem it from the charge of unreadableness by using the short form of the small s, by diminishing the number of tied letters, and abolishing the abbreviations to be found in medi?val books. How far he succeeded

antly passed the pitfalls that beset all tyros and had made types that in lining, fitting, and adjustment show the skill of the expert. "A printer of the old school may dislike many of his mannerisms of composition and make-up," adds Mr. De Vinne, "but he will cheerfully admit that his typ

F THE KELMSC

would scarcely receive ornament with the same exuberance as a volume of lyrical poems, or a standard classic, or such like. A work on Art, I think, bears less of ornament than any other kind of book (non bis in idem is a good motto); again, a book that must have illustrations, more or less utilitarian, should, I think, have no actual ornament at all, because the ornament and the illustration must almost certainly fight." He designed all his ornaments with his own hand, from the minute leaves and flowers which took the place of periods on his page, to the full-page borders, titles, and elaborate initials. He drew with a brush, on a sheet of paper from the Press marked with ruled lines, showing the exact position to be occupied by the design. "It was most usual during the last few years of his life," says Mr. Vallance, "to find him thus engaged, with his Indian ink and Chinese white in little saucers before him upon the table, its boards bare of any cloth covering, but littered with books and papers and sheets of MS. He did not place any value on the original drawings, regarding them as just temporary ins

lways drawn in pencil, a medium in which his most characteristic effects were obtained. They were then redrawn in ink by another hand, revised by Burne-Jones, and finally transferred to the block again by that useful Cinderella of the Kelmscott Press, photography. It is obvious that the Kelmscott books, whatev

, who was one of his personal friends; the chapter from Ruskin's Stones of Venice on "The Nature of the Gothic," with which he had such early and such close associations, and two more of his own works, The Defence of Guenevere and The Dream of John Ball. In the case of the four books written by himself he issued in addition to the paper copies a few on vellum. All these early books were small quartos and bound in vellum covers. Immediately following The Golden Legend came the Historyes of Troye, two volumes in the new type, Mackail's Biblia Innocentium, and Caxton's Reynarde the Foxe in large quarto size and printed in the Troy type. The year 1893 began with a comparatively modern book, Shakespeare's Poems, followed in rapid succession by Caxton's translation of The Order of Chivalry, in one volume with The Ordination of Knighthood, translated by Mo

R KELMSCOT

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the eleven of the previous year. The first was a large quarto edition of The Glittering Plain, printed this time in the Troy type and illustrated with twenty-three pic

Jones representing "the Maid," the heroine of the romance, and one of the most charming of the visionary women created by Morris. The Book of Wisdom and Lies, a Georgian story-book of the eighteenth century, written by Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, and translated by Oliver Wardrop, was the next stranger to come from the Press, and after it was issued the first of a set of Shelley's Poems. A rhymed version of The Penitential Psalms found in a manuscript of The Hours of Our Lady, written in the fifteenth century, followed it, and The Epistola de Contemptu Mundi, a letter in Italian by Savonarola, the autograph original of which belonged to Mr. Fairfax Murray, completed the list of this prolific year. The year 1895 produced only five volumes, the first of them the Tale of Beowulf,

time-long the kin

ut ceasing, nor mig

oe, for o'er stro

ongsome late lai

nithing, of night-

n of The Life and Death of Jason; two 16mo volumes of a new romance entitled, Child Christopher and Goldilands the Fair; and Rossetti's Hand and Soul, reprinted from the Germ, brought the Press to its great year 1896. This year was to see the completion of the folio Chaucer, which since early in 1892 had been in preparation, and had filled the

ere the only ones, however, concerning which Morris would own to feeling any interest. The Coleridge volume was followed by the large quarto edition of Morris's latest romance, The Well at the World's End in two volumes, and then appeared the Chaucer, the mere printing of which had occ

tters were each an elaborate work of art. The ornament indeed was too profuse to be wholly satisfactory, especially as much of it was repeated; nevertheless, the book was one of great magnificence and the glee with which Morris beheld it is not to be wondered at. The Chaucer type had been specially designed for it, and Burne-Jones had made

ed. The first of these to appear was the prose romance by Morris entitled The Water of the Wondrous Isles: this was issued on the first day of April, 1897, with borders and ornaments designed entirely by Morris save for a couple of initial words completed from his unfinished designs by R. Catterson-Smith. To this year belong also the two trial pages made for the intended folio edition of Froissart, the heraldic borders of which far surpass any of the Chaucer ornaments, and the two old English romances, Sire Degravaunt and Syr Ysambrace. In 1898 came a large quarto volume of Ge

from the Kelms

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full binding with the usual pressure for at least a year after its issue. The issue prices charged for the books were not low, but certainly not exorbitant when time, labour, and expense of producing them are taken into consideration. They were prizes for the collector from the beginning, the impossibility of duplicating them and the small editions sent out giving them a charm and a value not easily to be resisted, and Morris himself and his trustees adopted measures tending to protect the collector's interests. After the death of Morris all the woodblocks for initials, ornaments, and illustrations were sent to the British Museum and were accepted, with the condition that they should not be reproduced or printed from for the space of one hundred years. The electrotypes were destroyed. The matter was talked over with Morris during his lifetime and he sanctioned this course on the part of the trustees, its aim being to keep the series of the Kelmscott Press "a thing apart and to prevent the designs becoming stale by repetition." While there is a fair ground for the criticism frequently made that a man urging the necessity of art for the people showed inconsistency by withdrawing from their reach art which he could control and deemed valuable, it must be remembered that in his mind the great result to be obtained was the stirring up the people to

of 1894 had ever paid for even a fourteenth-century book. The paper copy of the Chaucer sold at the Ellis sale for one hundred and twelve pounds and a paper copy in ordinary binding sold in America in 1902 for $650, while a paper copy in the special pigskin binding brought $950 the same year. The issue price for the four hundred and twenty-five paper copies was twenty pounds apiece, and for the eight copies on vellum offered for sale out of the thirteen printed, a hundred and twenty guineas apiece. The posthumous edition of Sigurd the Volsung, the paper copies of which were issued at six guineas apiece, brought at the Ellis sale twenty-six pounds. News from Nowhere, issued at two guineas, has never yet brought a higher price than th