“Yet I think that to all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their energies, and that even beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies […]
Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legends was originally intended to be the first book printed at the Kelmscott Press. Troubles finding large enough paper, however, meant that the printers had to proceed with smaller volumes until the right supplies were available. It would become the Press’s 7th book, produced under the joint editorship of Morris […]
Cobden-Sanderson was deeply committed to his ideals in book design and handcraftsmanship. Upon the Doves Press’s closure, he was so worried that his beloved Doves type would be used for commercial purposes that he became determined to destroy every type piece. Acting directly against an agreement to share the type that he had made with […]
The Doves Press Bible is considered to be the Press’s crowning achievement in both typography and design. Cobden-Sanderson’s conception of the Bible was, like much of his life, unusual for the time. He was an avowed non-Christian and saw the Bible not as a religious text, but as a challenge: a means to experiment with […]
The great care that Cobden-Sanderson took in planning the layout and typography of each publication, no matter how insignificant, is evident in this pamphlet by J.W. Mackail, which records an address given to the Hammersmith Socialist Society in 1900. Its design is significant in the development of the Doves style in that it was the […]
The Doves Press was founded by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson in March 1893. It was a communal enterprise in which Cobden-Sanderson designed the books and supervised their production, while a fellow craftsman Emery Walker supervised technical production. Cobden-Sanderson himself had arrived at the bookbinding trade in a curious manner, one that highlights the interconnected nature of the […]
Essex House Press struggled financially, with the situation growing ever more precarious after 1904, when an ambitious print run of 300 copies of the Essex House Bible was met with only 40 subscribers and the printers were put on half time. The Press finally ceased production altogether in 1906. Ashbee, however, was convinced that someday […]
Though C.R Ashbee began his design career as an architect, he also crafted intricate silver tableware and jewelry, so it is fitting that Benvenuto Cellini’s treatise would be among the most ornate and ambitious books to emerge from the Essex House Press. The Treatises was first published in Florence in 1568, three years before Cellini’s […]
Education had always been an important aspect of C.R. Ashbee’s design practice. He surrounded himself with students and comrades that shared and tested new ideas, and the Guild of Handicraft itself functioned as one way to engage in design education. The Guild was interested in creating a formal and structured context within which this education […]
Influenced by the work of Ruskin, Ashbee believed that a healthy work environment was necessary for good craftsmanship, and the Guild of Handicraft’s location in smoky industrial Whitechapel was certainly not such a place. In 1901 he set his eye on Chipping Campden, a medieval wool town that had fallen on hard times. Many of […]