Thomas Hood’s satirical poem criticizes excessive consumption and the thirst for wealth with a moralizing tale of a young woman, who after losing her leg in an accident replaces it with a prosthetic made of gold. Though her suitors increase, she is repaid for her greed when a penniless count marries her for her money […]
These two slim, vellum bound volumes are part of a series of fourteen poems that C.R. Ashbee handpicked to be printed at the Essex House Press. Each has a hand-coloured wood engraving frontispiece and decorated initials, the products of a labour intensive process that would have been impossible for a larger volume. A number of […]
Like William Morris, C.R. Ashbee’s design practice was transformed by the reading of John Ruskin’s essays. He formed a ‘Ruskin reading group’ for working class men in Whitechapel, whom he nicknamed the B.W.M, or British Working Man. Though the idealistic young Cambridge graduate was initially intimidated by these rougher characters, he found their enthusiasm and […]
The Essex House Press printed this and two other Puritan titles, A Journal of the Life and Travels of John Woolman in the Service of the Gospel and Some Fruits of Solitude, in sextodecimo, a distinctively small format in which a single sheet is folded in half four times to make 16 leaves. The resulting […]
Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942), an architect by training, brought together a group of designers and artists to form a collective called the Guild of Handicraft in 1888. They sought to learn, develop and teach new skills in craftsmanship, and shared a common interest in simple living for both the spiritual and physical health of the […]
Please click on an image to enlarge it. You can navigate between images while viewing the larger versions. The Kelmscott Chaucer “is a beautiful work of craftsmanship which will show many generations of students what fine workmanship really is, but the names of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Morris and T.E. Lawrence give it a glow of […]
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones had been friends since their time at Oxford, and shared a love of the medieval period – both its artistic style and literature. Together they read Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and, caught up in the romantic notion of the spiritual craftsman, abandoned their plans to enter the Church in favour […]
The Queen’s Kelmscott Chaucer was donated to Douglas Library by Charles L. Burton in 1958 “to record his friendship for Leonard W. Brockington, Rector of the University, and his abiding admiration and gratitude for the great contribution of Queen’s, its teachers and scholars, to the life and well-being of Canada” (Douglas Library Notes). Burton, the […]
Though 438 copies were printed, the Queen’s Kelmscott Chaucer is one of only 48 editions bound in white pigskin with silver clasps at the Doves Bindery. The binding is hand tooled after Morris’s own design. In search of the highest quality supplies, Morris imported printer’s ink from Hanover and had the linen paper made at […]
This edition of Poems Chosen out of the Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is bound in simple limp vellum with silk ties: a deceptively plain casing for the intricate ornamentation within. Its opening pages feature the dense vegetal border that came to characterize the Kelmscott Press editions and would realize its full potential in the […]
