ABSTRACT
This chapter describes William Morris’s practice in assembling his library, followed by the history of his collection during his life and afterward. It provides an introduction to an aspect of Morris that is currently under-examined and that should lead to a great deal of important new work on Morris from the perspectives equally of intertextuality, historiography, the history of libraries, and his creative practice, especially with regard to the production of books. Morris’s collecting has been described by Paul Needham, Joseph Dunlap, Richard Landon, William S. and Sylvia Peterson, and Mark Samuels Lasner. His collecting went through several phases, of which the most important was the great acquisitive phase around the time that he was cultivating an interest in the practical side of book design, that is to say, from around 1889 to his death in 1896.
