ABSTRACT
A turning-point in understanding of the Kelmscott Press came in 1992 with the publication of Jerome McGann’s seminal essay “'Thing to Mind’: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,” subsequently republished as part of his Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Morris approached bookmaking—and indeed any form of creative practice—as a social and collaborative enterprise, feeling that beauty could only be “obtained by the harmonious cooperation of the craftsmen and artists who produce the book.” Within two years of founding the press, Morris began to codify the principles he was attempting to enshrine, and today it is difficult to consider the press separately from the lectures and short articles on the book arts that Morris delivered and published in the early 1890s whilst overseeing the press’s operations, usefully gathered together in 1982 by William S. Peterson under the collective title The Ideal Book.
