Photographs, Pens, and Print: William Morris and the

Technologies of Typography

Anna Wager

Book History, Volume 21, 2018, pp. 245-277 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2018.0008

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/711055

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
 Photographs, Pens, and Print

William Morris and the Technologies of Typography

Anna Wager

The origin story of William Morris’s typefaces for the Kelmscott Press has
an almost mythic status. In November of 1888, the influential printer and
engraver Emery Walker (1851–1933) gave a lecture on historical typefaces
to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, an event that compelled Morris to
try his hand at type design. Morris had long been interested in letterforms
and was a practicing calligrapher, but until this point he had not designed
any cast type himself. Walker’s lecture featured lantern slide enlargements of
early printed typographic examples and, although Morris owned many in-
cunabula and manuscripts, according to May Morris, “the sight of the finely
proportioned letters so enormously enlarged, and gaining rather than losing
by the process, the enlargement emphasizing all the qualities of the type…
stirred in him an overwhelming desire to hazard the experiment.”1 The three
typefaces that Morris designed were named for the books in which they
were first used: Golden type from The Golden Legend, Troy type from His-
tories of Troy, and the Chaucer type from the Chaucer (Figure 1), and they
were clearly indebted to the incunabula and manuscripts that he studied.
However, as this article will argue, Morris’s engagement with technologies
of both photographic and calligraphic enlargement was of equal importance
to these early-printed antecedents. That is, despite perceptions of Morris as
anti-industrialization and pro-idealized medievalism, his working practice
in typographic design was a synthesis of forward- as well as backward-
looking technological embrace: a melding of machine and craft.
In what follows, I reconsider Morris’s turn to typography and printing
through a focus on both the scale at which Morris designed, and the com-
bined luxuries of intensive study and contemporary technology that allowed
him to do so. Ultimately, Morris’s use of modern technology may have been
just as important to the Kelmscott Press as his views on craft. The photo-
graphic enlargements facilitated a more interactive study of the medieval ex-
amples he admired, while the manuscripts and incunabula he studied were
of course inextricably tied to handwriting and calligraphic technologies.
246 Book History

Figure 1. Catalog and prospectus from the Kelmscott Press, produced by Morris
and Sydney Cockerell, 2 July 1894. Image courtesy of the Rare Book and Manu-
script Library, Columbia University.
 William Morris and Technologies 247

Changes in pen shape and paper quality—not to mention the technological

imprint of the enlargements themselves—also shaped how Morris created
his letterforms. The central role of lantern slides in Morris’s type design
runs counter to lingering misconceptions of Morris as exclusively opposed
to modern technology. I argue that Morris’s reliance on these enlargements,
and their attendant utility in both photography and calligraphy at the end
of the nineteenth century, reveals a technological hybridity at the heart of
Morris’s design practice. Morris’s interactions with Walker’s enlarged pho-
tographs, and the shifting scalar possibilities that they fostered, allowed
him to create sanitized ideal typefaces, simultaneously bringing his work
towards, and distancing it from, handwriting and handcrafting. The process
of enlarging and copying as practiced by Walker made it possible to exam-
ine letterforms in various sizes, with an increased ability to view and thus
remove blemishes and imperfections inherent in handwriting. An analysis
of this technology clarifies both Morris’s working practice and his theories
of mechanization by examining the layering process that the enlargements
engendered. By turning to enlargement as a way to master design, Morris
was able to view projected letters as large, disconnected, sculptural objects,
which he could then trace, rephotograph, and refine. The forceful weighti-
ness of his typography was achievable through enlargement technologies,
and was therefore a crucial factor to the heaviness and visual density of the
Kelmscott Press.
Reviews of Walker’s lecture identify the projected typographic samples as
the event’s main attraction. In the November 16, 1888 Pall Mall Gazette,
Oscar Wilde praised, “Nothing could have been better… a series of most
interesting specimens of old printed books and manuscripts were displayed
on the screen by means of the magic lantern… the size of course being very
much enlarged.”2 Wilde’s review points to the twinned strands that led Mor-
ris to design type: Walker’s technologically enhanced enlargements, and the
calligraphic referent that both men championed. Walker ably proved “the
intimate connection between printing and handwriting—as long as the lat-
ter was good the printers had a living model to go by, but when it decayed
printing decayed also.”3 A large part of the lecture was devoted to discuss-
ing the progressive degradation of handwriting, and the typographic prob-
lems that emerged when letterforms were further distanced from the hand
of the scribe. Morris was moved by the demonstration, noting in a letter to
his daughter Jenny that “there were magic-lantern slides of pages of books,
and some telling contrasts between the good and bad,” were evident, point-
ing to the role of the enlargements in making the details of the letterforms
more visible.4
248 Book History

Walker’s lecture notes attest to the centrality of the enlarged images to his
argument, “which was that the main factor in a well printed book was the
type.”5 He “selected many examples of earlier and later printing and had
lantern slides made from them. This method of bringing home a point to the
audience was then comparatively novel and the lecture, in spite of my poor
delivery, was generally considered a success.”6 Later, while traveling with
Walker through wintry London, Morris is said to have proposed “a new
fount of type,” spurred on by the lecture he had just witnessed, predicated
on the novelty of the enlargements.7 Walker became a crucial collaborator
with Morris, but declined an official partnership offer. This may have been
because Walker was too busy, lacked the capital, or had “some sense of
proportion,” as he replied to Morris, who had posed a partnership offer
by warning Walker, “I shall want to do everything my own way.”8 Despite
Walker’s reticence, he became, in the words of contemporary Walter Crane,
Morris’s “constant and faithful helper in all the technicalities of the print-
ers’ craft.”9 Walker’s knowledge, his lantern slides, and his photogravures
were the material and technological basis for the successful operation of the
Kelmscott Press.
Morris, it is well known, opposed the use of machinery when it was used
to restrict workers’ rights—when factory production and industrialization
led to drudgery, boredom, and safety violations. But contrary to notions
of Morris as anti-modern technology, his reliance on nineteenth-century
photographic innovations, and the shifting scale and tracing that they fa-
cilitated, was imperative to the foundation of the Kelmscott Press. In 1896,
a month after Morris’s death, Frank Colebrook described Morris’s cau-
tious embrace of machinery in a lecture to students at the St. Bride Printing
School, remarking that “Morris has no hatred of printing machines so long
as they do not convert the ‘minders’ into being also printing machines.”10
Morris also welcomed using machines to cast his type; as Henry Halliday
Sparling related, Morris said “from all I hear, there wasn’t much fun” in
hand casting.11 After the initial punches were made by Edward P. Prince,
the mechanical typecasting was completed at Fann Street Foundry under
Talbot Baines Reed.12 The foundry utilized the Benton-Waldo pantographic
punch-cutting machine, where a “follower” pen traced the image onto a
wax-coated plate, which was then covered with copper, leading to a raised
outline on this “pattern plate”; this process allowed for letters to be easily
scaled and consistently replicated.13 Walker’s enlarged projections were also
easily scaled, which was essential to Morris’s process of drawing and repho-
tographing the letterforms. The importance of scalability for both designing
and punch-cutting at the end of the nineteenth century demonstrates the
 William Morris and Technologies 249

ability of new technologies to foster interactive design. The photographs

also crucially allowed and encouraged close study, essential for Morris’s
craftsmanship; while we might assume mechanized “aids” would allow the
creation process to be more streamlined, the translation of images through
enlargement and tracing actually made the process slower and more deliber-
ate.
The printing at Kelmscott Manor was done on an iron handpress, the
Albion, which was invented by Richard Cope in 1823, and named for the
toggling mechanism that it utilized. In contrast to earlier wooden presses,
the platen on the Albion was easier to move due to advances in the toggle
and lever, which allowed for a smoother pull with less resistance. There
were several benefits to this method of printing, which permitted more
careful adjustments and subtle degrees of pressure with less physical stress
on the person operating the press.14 Morris often had no qualms adopting
nineteenth-century innovations—whether the Albion press or mechanical
typesetting—particularly if they helped spare some tedious labor. Yet si-
multaneously, Morris’s view of preindustrial technology remained nostal-
gic, and he stated that “pleased as I am with my printing, when I saw my
two men at work on the press yesterday with their sticky printers’ ink, I
couldn’t help lamenting the simplicity of the scribe and his desk, and his
black ink and blue and red ink, and I almost felt ashamed of my press after
all.”15 He remained adamantly pro-guild, while also romanticizing the idea
of the solitary scribe. Rather than disparaging his printing enterprise at the
Kelmscott Press, Morris’s passion for incunabula and manuscripts was en-
hanced through his embrace of photographic technologies, which allowed
him to design and examine examples on vastly different scales concurrently:
a complement to his valorization of the medieval, not a detraction from it.
Walker’s lecture has been documented as an important linchpin that
jumpstarted Morris’s career as a type designer. In the 1957 exhibition “The
Typographical Adventure of William Morris,” the organizers noted that
the relative simplicity of receiving photographic enlargements from Walker
“no doubt gave Morris the idea of studying the old letters” in a new way,
“an example of Morris using modern techniques to achieve a result. The
method has since become standard form.”16 John Dreyfus stated that Mor-
ris’s encounter with the enlarged images was “the first occasion known to
me of a type designer using photography both to study types and to pro-
duce his working drawings,” an assertion recently reinforced in the work
of William S. Peterson.17 Morris’s contemporaries H. Halliday Sparling,
Frank Colebrook, and Sydney Cockerell extensively documented the work-
ing processes at the Kelmscott Press, as well as Morris’s book collecting
250 Book History

and his relationship with Walker.18 The importance of the enlargements is

evident in scholarship on the press, particularly as a tool to understand-
ing Morris’s design process—Peterson elucidates the paradox of the Kelm-
scott Press, “the quintessential example of an arts-and-crafts longing for
the pre-industrial age… built upon a foundation of photography, one of the
most sophisticated forms of technology in late-Victorian England.”19 This
technological foundation, as we shall see, was a necessary framework for
Morris to study manuscripts and incunabular printing. The ability to work
from enlargements allowed Morris to “perfect” typography, distancing his
process from handcraft while simultaneously valorizing the handcraft of the
past. I argue that these technological specifics are vital for understanding the
nuanced layering of trace, drawing, photographic processes, and historical
precedents that informed Morris’s work. This allows us to study how the
enlarged letters led to the sumptuous design choices of the Kelmscott Press,
which influenced the rest of the fine press movement.
In 1885, Walker and Walter Boutall created the firm “Walker and Boutall,
Automatic and Photographic Engravers,” where they developed a form of
process-engraving that was ideal for illustrating books with photographs.20
Process-engraving was closely related to photogravures, a photo-mechanical
transfer where a copper plate is exposed to a film positive and then etched,
leading to an intaglio print with the detail of a photograph. At the time, this
was the best way to reproduce photographic images quickly. Photogravures
were initially developed by William Henry Fox Talbot, who also invented
the photographic system of positive and negative photography, the calo-
type method, which allowed for an infinite reproduction of prints from a
negative, and is the basis for modern photography. Walker’s photographic
lantern slides were made at his photo-engraving firm, many from Morris’s
books.21 “Automatic” in the firm’s title references part of the photographic
process, but it also connotes a disembodied activity. The act of photo-en-
graving is implicitly not reliant upon human “crafting,” in contrast to cal-
ligraphy.
This human crafting was central to prior typographic developments, as
it was for Morris—just in a modified way, with a photographic interces-
sor. Morris’s Roman font, Golden, is indebted to the work of two Venetian
printers, Nicholas Jenson (1420–80) and Jacobus Rubeus (active 1470–80s).
Walker showed Leonardo Bruni’s Historiae Florentini populi, printed by Ja-
cobus Rubeus in 1476 (Figure 2), and Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis,
printed by Nicolas Jenson in 1476 (Figure 3), photographed from books
that Morris owned. Golden is a humanist, old style Roman: the letters are
based on incunabular typefaces, which in turn were based on handwriting.
 William Morris and Technologies 251

Figure 2. Leonardo Bruni, Historiae Florentini populi (Venice: Jacobus Rubeus,

1476). Image courtesy of the Hunterian Library Special Collections, University of
Glasgow Library.
252 Book History

Figure 3. Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis (Venice: Nicolas Jenson, 1476). Image
courtesy of the Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum Digitale Bibliothek und Bayer-
ische Staatsbibliothek.
 William Morris and Technologies 253

The scribal hand is visible in the oblique stress on the bar of the lowercase
e, for instance, the same way that the line would be made with the nib of
a pen. Further characteristics of these Italian typefaces include a tilted axis
on the o, thickly bracketed serifs, a double-storied g, and diamond-shaped
punctuation, which suggest the depositing of ink from a broad-nibbed quill
pen. These early printers were working directly within the technological
and cultural influence of manuscript creation, producing texts for a read-
ing public that was used to seeing certain kinds of letterforms. Their design
choices reflect both cultural expectations and technological options, which
meant that handwriting and printing were symbiotic in Rubeus and Jen-
son. Morris is tapping into the long-standing importance and centrality of
handwriting to printed letterforms, but he did so through a distinctly late
nineteenth-century method, demonstrating the co-presence of old and new
in his typographic designs.
Morris studied incunabular types “photographed to a big scale” and then
in his words “drawing it over many times before I began designing my own
letter; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it
servilely.”22 This working practice involved repetitive drawing, facilitated by
tracing enlargements. Once the drawings were mastered, he could introduce
changes. It is this trajectory that is central to arts education—one starts with
life drawing and moves to abstraction, generally not the reverse. In a 1917
submission in the Times Literary Supplement, Walker described the difficul-
ties in designing a new type, since “the designer of a new fount, when he
seeks to base it on an old one, is confronted with the problem of finding out
details of it, so obscured nearly always are the shapes of the letters by over-
inking and imperfect presswork.”23 Crucially, the enlargements allowed for
the “finding out details” of older typefaces, which freed up Morris to modify
the letterforms to more modern usage, an intersection of old craft and new
technology. The reinterpretation afforded by the enlargements gave Morris
the ability to perfect incunabular typefaces by examining them at a large
scale, noting the blemishes, and “correcting” them. As Colebrook stated in
his lecture, “the old style fanatic copies the incidental chips and marks and
roughnesses over which the original cutter used language of old style vehe-
mence, they being simply defects due to the rudeness of the tools or the ma-
terials used. Morris is dead against imitation for imitations sake.”24 Morris
was not just obsessed with an idealized medieval past—he instead utilized
technology to improve upon the past. Yet it is also worth noting that he was
working with enlargements, not magnifications. The images are bigger, but
the components were still sometimes a bit obscured, observed via a techno-
logical innovation that inhibited as well as enabled “finding out details.”
254 Book History

Walker’s point about “over-inking and imperfect presswork” also divorces

the enlarged letterforms from their more utilitarian purpose. When exam-
ined at a large scale, the letters become almost sculptural objects, removed
from their original context. No one at Walker’s Arts and Crafts Exhibition
Society lecture was trying to read the original Latin: they were looking at
the shapes of the letterforms.
Troy and Chaucer, Morris’s blackletter typefaces, were also based on in-
cunabular examples, stemming from fifteenth-century German printmakers
such as Peter Schoeffer in Mainz, Johannes Mentelin in Strasbourg, and
Johann Zainer in Ulm.25 In contrast to the Golden, the process for the black-
letter was more straightforward, or at least less tortured. Walker claimed
that Morris “drew the whole alphabet straight away—more or less ‘out of
his head,’” yet as Peterson noted, the archival record shows that Morris
did a great deal of drawing and reworking of the blackletter, too.26 Troy
and Chaucer are not as vertical as some of the incunabular examples, again
proving their modified format. While interested in historical correctness,
Morris was also worried about the rise of “bogus medievalism,” a form of
recovery particularly popularized in the nineteenth century by Owen Jones,
whose pseudo-medieval designs are a hallmark of Gothic Revival architec-
ture in England.27
When we examine the Troy type used in Kelmscott’s Laudes Beatae Mar-
iae Virginis (1896, Figure 4), we can see the influence of blackletter printing.
Troy is notably non-spiky: there is roundness to the bowls in the letters,
with contrast that suggests the use of a broad-nibbed pen. In comparing it
to Boccaccio’s De Claris mulieribus (Figure 5), printed in 1473 by Johann
Zainer in Ulm and held in Morris’s library, similarities are evident in the
roundness of the forms, and the sharp angle on the diacritical marks. Yet
Troy is not a copy, of course: Morris’s uppercase D is more stylized, as is the
lowercase a, to choose just two examples. As a reprinting of a fourteenth-
century text, the fitness of the Troy for the Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis is
evident. At the same time, Morris was also not copying fourteenth-century
printing conventions, either. He objected to the use of contractions and tied
letters, noting that “I entirely eschewed contractions, except for the ‘&’….
I designed a black-letter type which I think I may claim to be as readable
as a Roman one, and to say the truth I prefer it to the Roman.”28 It is this
readability that does mark Troy and Chaucer, which avoided the pitfalls of
angularity and overcrowding.
An example of this tension between historically accurate design and at-
tractive fakery: Gothic scripts were often very narrow and compressed,
which was due in large part to scribes trying to save space on their precious
 William Morris and Technologies 255

Figure 4. Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, July

1896). Image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington.
256 Book History

Figure 5. Giovanni Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus (Ulm: Johann Zainer, 1473).

Image courtesy of the Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum Digitale Bibliothek und
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
 William Morris and Technologies 257

paper reserves. Scribes were also required to write quickly, as the copy-
ing process needed to meet the demands of church and customer. These
tendencies towards space-saving and haste were exactly what Morris was
trying to reverse at the Kelmscott Press. There is a key cognitive dissonance
here. Morris fetishized blackletter as a pseudo-medieval handcraft, while
it was being created in the nineteenth century through a completely differ-
ent, scaled up, “rationalized” method of production. Medieval scribes were
not tracing letterforms over and over to perfect them; they were writing as
quickly as possible, and from this repetitive process individual styles were
born. While Morris’s practice was also repetitive, he instead worked from
existing examples to slowly and deliberately create his own. His typefaces
were an attempt to reintegrate letterforms into a holistic approach to book
production, where design and content were cohesive. The extensive amount
of white space on the sumptuous pages of the Kelmscott Press books was a
signifier of intentional gratuitous excess, standing as a visual mark of Mor-
ris’s resistance to industrialization. It was simultaneously counter to the
scribal copying to which he was indebted.
Part of Morris’s critique of nineteenth-century typefaces was their asso-
ciation with commercial printing. He described his ideal Roman as a “letter
pure in form: severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thick-
ening and thinning of the line, which is the essential fault of the ordinary
modern type, and which makes it difficult to read, and not compressed lat-
erally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies.”29
Charles Ricketts (1866–1931), a fine press printer and proprietor of the Vale
Press, stage designer, and aesthete, stated that the only way to save typog-
raphy was to “add to it an element of harmony which it lacks at present.”30
Like Morris, Ricketts located the defects of modern printing with mechani-
zation and the pressure to publish more cheaply, “primarily from the need
to economize on space in order to save money; an economy, it should be
added, which has been pushed so far that words have become almost illeg-
ible if it were not for the immoderate use of white spaces between them,”
believing that earlier printers were at an advantage over nineteenth-century
revivalists because they had closer ties to better handwriting.31 Concurrent-
ly, Walker also believed that “the most successful of the founts used by the
so-called ‘private presses’ are not exact copies ‘stolen’ from antiquity, but
modifications adapted to modern usage.”32 It is clear that Morris followed
this dictum as well: he was designing with nineteenth-century technology
for nineteenth-century readers. Yet these readers were also conditioned to
expect modern style letterforms, born out of eighteenth-century typefaces
that were narrower and lighter than what Morris produced.
258 Book History

One of Walker’s main targets in the lecture was a contemporary copy of

Ruskin, which was printed in Bodoni, a narrower eighteenth-century Ro-
man. In the Fors Clavigera from 1871 (Figure 6), the use of this modern
typeface and extensive leading produced a page that was grey and unimpres-
sive. Walker located the design problems of the Ruskin “in the wrong pro-
portions of margins, in excessive space between lines and words, in faulty
type-design, and in the use of cheap ink and paper.”33 Morris referred to
Bodoni letterforms as “sweltering hideousness… the most illegible type that
was ever cut,” with Walker adding at the lecture that Bodoni is “to whom
we are indebted for the ungraceful types now used in Blue books and news-
papers.”34 The emphatic verticality of Bodoni and other late eighteenth-
century typefaces stands in stark contrast to the medieval and incunabular
examples that Morris and Walker both favored.
Morris and Walker’s argument is predicated on the conviction that good
printed letterforms were contingent upon on good handwriting. Walker
stated in his lecture that “if we want beautiful type, we must write beauti-
fully,” tying type construction to writing, and therefore implicitly to the me-
dieval and calligraphic.35 In his lecture notes, Walker had originally written
“we must teach children to write beautifully” and replaced it with “we must
write beautifully.” It is a small substitution, but suggests Walker’s worry
about the degradation of handwriting, as humans moved further towards
mechanized production at the end of the nineteenth century. He was con-
cerned about the loss of the art of writing without educational initiatives
to combat it, yet the nineteenth century was actually a flourishing period
for nascent public school systems in England.36 Walker’s real problem, as
we will see, was with steel-nibbed pens, which served to change the shape
of letterforms. The loss of knowledgeable practitioners of older technolo-
gies, equivalent to a loss of preservation, is present in discussions about
punchcutting as well—the rise of mechanized punchcutting made workers
like Edward P. Prince into a sought-after commodity. With the decline of
guilds and printing houses, these concerns were brought to the fore in the
nineteenth century.
The visual hallmarks of modern typefaces, such as Bodoni, are the densi-
ty of white space on the page and extensive leading between lines, combined
with the thinness of the type, which produced an overall greying effect.
Henri-Jean Martin described modern style as the “triumph of white over
black,” on the page, leading to works that were comparatively lighter, paler,
and less dense than early printing.37 In contrast, Morris’s letters are force-
fully black, standing in sharp contrast to the white page. Morris did not use
any leading between lines, as “he sought to achieve the solid rectangular
 William Morris and Technologies 259

Figure 6. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of
Great Britain (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1871). Image courtesy of the Ha-
thiTrust, Google digitized.
260 Book History

page of the Mediaeval book.”38 Moving beyond aesthetic preferences, mod-

ern faces are more mechanical, and to certain quarters in the nineteenth
century, they were viewed as visually and materially inferior. Morris and
Walker were not alone in reviving incunabular faces as a way to counter
modern style. Part of the nineteenth-century critique of thinner types was
their associations with the feminine. Theodore Low De Vinne (1828–1914),
the father of American high-quality printing, urged a return to “masculine
printing” in an article of the same title in 1892.39 While his criticisms were
couched as aesthetic concerns, they point to an uglier side of the argument:
as more female authors and readers were given publishing space, male print-
ers could turn reactionary against the newer market, and against the type-
faces that signified it. According to Megan L. Benton, “reformers, in exalt-
ing preindustrial type forms and production methods, were also implicitly
invoking the superiority of a past in which men (not machines, and not
women) dominated book culture itself.”40
Yet these value judgments could also be reversed: modern types were
seen as refined, and older types as rough. Partisans of modern typefaces
praised them for being delicate, “a word which then suggested to the writer
related adjectives like fine, sensitive, graceful, and exquisite, while old-face
types were labeled heavy, coarse, and clumsy.”41 Delicacy and fineness here
correlated to “refinement—that is, a more advanced state of civilization—
whereas Morris, when he turned his attention to type-design, saw thin
strokes as a symptom of modern decadence and overreacted by thickening
his own Golden type tremendously.”42 Even if Morris had not been morally
opposed to modern types—which he very vocally was—they would have
looked aesthetically incorrect in his books, totally overwhelmed by the bor-
ders and wood engravings.43 Central to Morris and Walker’s dismissals of
contemporary fonts is their conviction that the deficiencies are mechanically
rooted, pushed by commerce to be thinner and more compressed. Divorcing
letterform construction from the act of handwriting was viewed as a prob-
lem, yet by tracing and drawing from photographed examples—instead of
writing—Morris was actually moving away from handwriting, too.
Morris’s letterforms were allowed to sprawl, to luxuriate in more space,
an option not available to most early printers—or any printers beyond the
fine press movement. In opposition to a push towards the fast and cheap,
Morris’s design process instead evoked a mantra of “slow printing”: he ex-
amined the enlargements, tracing the letterforms repeatedly to understand
their general shape, creating “a group of free-hand drawings, still to the
same large scale,” which Walker then photographed and reduced to the
 William Morris and Technologies 261

scale of the original type.44 These transcriptions spanned drawing and pho-
tography. May Morris’s perspective on this point deserves to be quoted at
length:

The enlargements enabled Father to study the proportions and pe-

culiarities of the letters. Having thoroughly absorbed these, so to
speak, he started designing his own type on this big scale. When
done, each letter was photographed down to the size the type was
to be. Then he and Walker criticized them and brooded over them;
then he worked on them again on the large scale until he got every-
thing right. The point about all this is… that while he worked on
the letters on this large scale, he did not then, as is often done with
drawings for mechanical reproduction, have the design reduced
and think no more about it; it was considered on its own scale as
well; and, indeed, when the design had passed into the expert and
sympathetic hands of Mr. Prince and was cut, the impression—a
smoked proof—was again considered, and the letter sometimes re-
cut. My father used to go about with matchboxes containing these
“smokes” of the type in his pockets, and sometimes as he sat and
talked with us, he would draw one out, and thoughtfully eye the
small scraps of paper inside. And some of the letters seemed to be
diabolically inspired, and would not fall into line for awhile, and
then there were great consultations till the evil spirit was subdued.45

This process of enlargement-trace-drawing-reduction was technologically

revolutionary, but it also fit simultaneously into a timeline of typographic
changes, with attendant challenges in sizing, adapting, and designing.
There were two forms of enlargements in use: lantern slides at Walker’s
lecture, and photographic prints for later study. Enlargement technologies,
as a method of enlarging objects by projecting them with controlled light-
ing, were not possible until the late nineteenth century when the world had
been electrified with steady controlled light. The technology that Morris and
Walker used was thus very new, demonstrating Morris’s willingness to be an
early adopter, concurrent with his social-labor concerns about mechaniza-
tion.46 Since the invention of the daguerreotype in the 1830s, photography
walked a fine line between art and science, freezing scenes and allowing
for extended observation. Lantern slides were most often a standard and
very small size, around 3¼ x 4". They would be reduced from the original
glass plate negative size to fit the lantern, through the process of rephoto-
graphing. Walker’s lecture would have involved glass plates appropriate for
use in a magic lantern, projected onto a wall or screen, as a way to study
262 Book History

the enlarged projected version. Like an overhead projector today, the focus
and the size of the image depended on how near or far the slide was from
the wall. Lantern slides were also usually positive glass plate images: the
negative glass plate would have been contact-printed onto another glass
plate to make the positive.47
Morris also extensively studied from photographic prints, which were
produced by Walker and Boutall. To enlarge or reduce the size of an image
in the second half of the nineteenth century, the process would be to just
take another photograph of the image with a different-sized camera. For
example, if the original image was taken on an 8 x 11" negative, in an 8 x
11" camera, that could be rephotographed with a larger camera and glass
plate, or with a smaller one, to make a larger or smaller image. This would
allow Morris to view his designs at various sizes; this shifting of scale is a
necessary hallmark of the projected enlargements, too. The process may
seem inefficient and unwieldy to us, but it made sense at the time. When
May Morris talks about Walker photographing and reducing, this would
have been the process that he utilized. Morris’s process was to trace from
photographic enlargements, modify his designs, and then have Walker pho-
tographically reduce the image to be equivalently sized to a piece of type. In
letters to Edward F. Stevens, Walker simply explained part of the enlarge-
ment process: “We made photographs of a considerable number of types
enlarged to a uniform size of five times of the originals. All the books from
which they were taken were in his [Morris’s] own library.”48 The systematic
nature of this practice is not unexpected, but it does reinforce the use of
enlargements as slightly clinical and standardized design aids.
It is one thing to design at a large size and reduce down, and quite an-
other to actually punch cut the letters, and this is where the distinctions
between theoretical design and craftsmanship divided. Sparling describes
the punches cut “with great intelligence and skill” by Edward P. Prince, who
was in “constant consultation with Morris while at work on them.”49 Mor-
ris noted on the initial “smoked” print of the h about Prince’s “tendency
to make everything a little too rigid and square is noticeable: Can this be
remedied.”50 The back-and-forth process between Morris and Prince, who
was an established punchcutter, speaks to the technical changes and shifts
between drawing a letter and producing it in metal. This pattern of ex-
change is common typographic practice—although Morris, as a notorious
perfectionist, was probably more finicky than some of his type-designing
brethren. The increasingly specialized division of labor in the nineteenth
century was a contributing factor to these communication failures, part of a
longer trajectory in the separation of punchcutting and designing into two
 William Morris and Technologies 263

distinct jobs; this division was oppositional to the “perfected” typefaces that
Morris was envisioning.51
In turning to both the calligraphic hand and enlargements, Morris worked
in a scribal design method that was filtered through contemporary technol-
ogy. He had the benefit of funds and reputation to throw into his printing
enterprise, while serving as a model for his peers by reinterpreting older
fonts and using higher quality paper and inks. The Kelmscott printings are
an embodiment of allusive typography, where the type matches in tone and
aesthetic intent the content of the text.52 When stripped away from borders,
wood engravings, and pseudo-medieval page design, Golden feels heavy and
slablike, but the whole effect collectively works to create an integrated page.
Allusive typography is the link between the enlarged scale of the pages of
Morris’s books, and the enlarged scale of the type projected on the wall:
space for the type to breathe, on the page and in photography. To accom-
plish this integration of text and aesthetics, Morris and his colleagues had to
master awareness of historical precedents with knowledge of contemporary
expectations. Enlargements allowed for perfection by exactly replicating ty-
pographic elements to be the exact shape that the designer wanted. Yet there
is something decadent about a too-perfect font, one that cannot actually
be created by fallible human hands. Craftsmen like Prince were restricted
through the technological process of printing, affected by innovations that
served to move typefaces further from the hand of the scribe.53
The changes between Morris’s initial designs, from the enlargements to
the finished faces, show that what might be visualized could not actually
be rendered. However, it would be physically possible to get the lowercase
h exactly how Morris wanted it, in the digital version of the Golden—pur-
chasable today for $35 in either Original or Bold—because physical human
fallibility has been reduced as part of the design process. Benton described
this as “the ability of the machine to achieve a fineness of line that eluded
the pen stroke,” a development that simultaneously expanded some areas
of type design while limiting others.54 Printing is an inherently technical
process, and the “change of typefaces must be traced back to new needs
necessitated, or new possibilities opened, by technical improvements.”55 Ty-
pographer Ruari McLean pointed out that the move from metal type to
filmsetting also led to a greater variety of forms, since “many letter forms
which could be drawn with a pencil, a pen, a brush or a crayon could not
easily be cut or cast in metal.”56
While enlargements were crucial for Morris’s design process, so was the
comparatively simple act of writing by hand. Changes in letterforms are in-
extricably linked to changes in pen shape and usage. At his lecture in 1888,
264 Book History

Walker showed a page from Ludovico degli Arrighi’s copybook, Il modo

de temperare le penne con le varie sorti de littere ordinate, printed from
woodblocks in Rome in 1523. Arrighi, known to Victorian audiences as
Vicentino, was a sixteenth-century Venetian scribe and typographer. Morris
owned a copy of this Arrighi, and would have been able to see it enlarged
at the lecture, and close at hand in his library. When the enlarged copybook
page appeared on the screen, according to Oscar Wilde, it “was greeted with
a spontaneous round of applause.”57 Il modo de temperare le penne was a
calligraphic guide with practical instructions about how to sharpen quills
and shape letters, a product of a time when quills and parchment and linen
paper were the primary method of written communication.58 The illustra-
tions are instructive, in one instance showing the reader how to turn a raw
quill into a writing instrument through a number of strategic cuts (Figure
7). Arrighi also highlighted different scripts (Figure 8), many of which have
a flourish to the letters that would be harder to replicate in metal-casting.
Since Arrighi’s letters were carved out of a woodblock, there was more flu-
idity of line possible, with closer visual ties to handwriting.59 Arrighi’s cal-
ligraphic examples are in keeping with contemporary writing instruction,
and the letterforms in Il modo de temperare le penne affected later italic
types.60 The Arrighi guide was a sixteenth-century woodblock printing of
calligraphic models, which was subsequently rendered in enlarged form
through the magic lantern for a nineteenth-century audience.
The move toward broadpens from pointed quills in the eighteenth cen-
tury is an instance of technological innovations affecting letterforms. Tra-
ditional quills were more apt to wear down on wood pulp paper, which
supplanted rag and linen paper in the nineteenth century.61 Quills were then
replaced by steel-nibbed pens, which had developed in France in the middle
of the eighteenth century. By the time of the Kelmscott Press, steel-nibbed
pens were the norm, and due to the “metallurgy, markets, and machine-
building” engendered by the Industrial Revolution, relatively inexpensive,
both cheap to produce and hard to break.62 Pointed quills had the benefit
of being sharper then broadpens, which also linked them to burins used
in engraving.63 Importantly, the lines they produced were also thinner, and
pointed quills were more sensitive to pressure from the hand, meaning a
sharper contrast in line size was possible, which heightened the contrast
between thin and thick strokes.64 Pointed nibs allowed for finer, sharper
terminals, the ending point of penstrokes. The serifs in Bodoni are thin and
flat, for example, while the serifs in Golden are at an angle, suggesting the
lifting of the pen in the act of writing.65 The modern typefaces that Morris
 William Morris and Technologies 265

Figure 7. Pen instructions, Ludovico degli Arrighi, Il modo de temperare le penne

con le varie sorti de littere ordinate, Rome, from woodblocks cut by Ugo da Carpi
and Eustachio Celebrino, c. 1523. Image courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Col-
lection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.
266 Book History

Figure 8. Calligraphic samples, Ludovico degli Arrighi, Il modo de temperare le

penne con le varie sorti de littere ordinate, Rome, from woodblocks cut by Ugo da
Carpi and Eustachio Celebrino, c. 1523. Image courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosen-
wald Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.
 William Morris and Technologies 267

and Walker hated were indebted to new pen shapes, and were then popular-
ized as a way to print more quickly and cheaply.
The ability to work from enlargements was the primary motivating force
behind Morris’s type design. His previous printing experiences were mostly
with mainstream presses; his commercially printed books were produced at
London’s Chiswick Press, whose typographic choices reflected the Caslon
revival by printing from early eighteenth-century British examples.66 He and
Burne-Jones had considered making a deluxe Earthly Paradise in the 1860s,
but Morris abandoned it because he could not find a typeface that effec-
tively worked with the wood engravings.67 Throughout his career, Morris
did often weigh in on design choices—designing the cover for the Reeves
and Turner/Ballantyne Press The Earthly Paradise in 1890, for instance—
but generally shied away from more specific typographic suggestions. While
concerned with page layout, his interest centered on ornamentation—like
the effect of borders and illustrations—rather than the typeface itself.68
When coupled with samples of handwriting, and Morris’s own interest in
calligraphy, Walker’s lecture was a crucial juncture.
Yet Morris’s interest in calligraphy is part of the broader story. At a prac-
tical level, he had a great deal of prior experience crafting letterforms. He
also continually placed manuscripts higher than incunabula in his artistic
hierarchy, typically valorizing handcraft. At the same time, his own cal-
ligraphic output was in large part that of a dilettante. Morris dabbled in
calligraphy, using incongruous materials indiscriminately, and often stop-
ping transcriptions before the whole work was completed.69 His approach
to calligraphy was nonspecialist, yet the results are often charming, greater
than the sum of their parts. A Book of Verse, designed for Georgiana Burne-
Jones in 1870, is a prime example. Decorated with gouache inset panels by
Edward Burne-Jones, Morris’s text intertwines with snaking vines and foli-
age, a referent for both his wallpaper designs, especially “Willow,” and the
later foliate borders in the Kelmscott Press works. In “Meeting in Winter,”
Morris’s delicate script owes a much greater debt to Renaissance humanist
letterforms, like Arrighi, and Carolingian miniscule, with the rounded slope
of the letters, than it does to blackletter. Jerome McGann argues that A
Book of Verse was the first time Morris achieved a “total integration of all
its textual elements,” thanks to his artistic collaborations and “cooperative
design,” an important step on his way to forming the Kelmscott Press.70 The
look of A Book of Verse and his later printing is different, however. There is
a good deal of leading between lines, producing a lightened effect—the sort
of effect that Morris would revile in commercial printing twenty-five years
later. This production was obviously created under different circumstances
268 Book History

than his printing enterprise, but it is notable how few immediate visual par-
allels there are between his handwriting and his typefaces.
Although Morris’s aim was not to produce historically correct calligraph-
ic specimens, he did turn to the Arrighi while designing the frontispiece for A
Dream of John Ball (Figure 9). Underneath Burne-Jones’s wood-engraving
is Morris’s couplet in roman capitals, “When Adam Delved and Eve Span /
Who Was Then The Gentleman,” which has calligraphic lifts on several of
the terminals. As Morris wrote to Walker in 1892, “I helped myself out of
that piece of Ludovico, which by the by is more than halfway toward black-
letter.”71 Walter Crane described the Golden as effectively a “Roman type
under Gothic influence”—but so were Jenson and Rubeus, too.72 Print his-
tory has segmented these two typeface categories, but their collective indebt-
edness to calligraphy is something that Morris drew from for his typefaces.
Again, according to Crane, Morris was “wont to say that he considered the
glory of the Roman alphabet was in its capitals, but the glory of the Gothic
alphabet was in its lower case letters.”73 Morris’s letterforms are a hybrid
of the two, and he often traced Gothic and Roman letterforms on a single
sheet of paper, demonstrating the sort of historical blending that occurred
during the fifteenth century, when both typefaces existed simultaneously.74
Despite this historical consciousness, Morris was cavalier about the pens
that he used; his own quills were often cut irregularly, and he used crow
quills instead of goose quills, which led to a much narrower nib.75 Calligra-
phy gave him the tools he needed to work with the photographic enlarge-
ments. This sort of calligraphic training contributed to Morris’s drawing
from Leonardo Bruni’s Historiae Florentini populi, printed by Rubeus (Fig-
ure 10). The lines composing Morris’s letters are angular, and they awk-
wardly intersect. The g is self-consciously rigid, while the long s betrays an
almost jerky motion of the pen at the apex of the letter. But these letters
were not written with a broadpen: they were traced from a photographic
print and then filled in with a narrower pen. The sketched letters in the bot-
tom line suggest Morris’s process of tracing, inking, and reworking.
As in the Kelmscott Press books, Morris’s calligraphy was aesthetically
balanced by illuminated borders and illustrations. This visual density has
led to charges that the Kelmscott books are illegible, or at the very least that
their main point is not legibility. They have been viewed as impressive art,
but not as books. Despite Morris’s professed aims to make books that were
easy to read, by not troubling “the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of
form in the letters,” the works were frequently criticized by his historian-
colleagues, especially in the twentieth century.76 “Notes on Morrisania” in
1896 stated that the Kelmscott books were better for collectors, not readers,
 William Morris and Technologies 269

Figure 9. William Morris, A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson (Hammer-
smith: Kelmscott Press, 1892). Image courtesy of Special Collections, University of
Iowa Libraries.

an idea which persists.77 Bruce Rogers acknowledged in 1900 that Morris’s

types were handsome, but that readability was “lacking in all three faces,
and that is the first requisite. His books are, some of them, very beautiful
but they are rather curiosities of bookmaking than real books.”78 We are
now also viewing his printing through the lens of modern typefaces and
commercial bookmaking. If one is used to reading Bodoni, or even Times
New Roman, then of course Golden will look dense and dark.
The critical assessment of the Kelmscott Press and legibility stands in
contrast to Morris’s stated intention: “I have always been a great admirer of
the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which took its
place. As to the fifteenth-century books, I had noticed that they were always
beautiful by force of the mere typography.”79 The last part of this statement
is an important summation of Morris’s design ethos, as he strove to combine
beauty and utility. The books were beautiful because of the typography, and
typography is ultimately there to be read.80 Yet “beautiful by force of the
mere typography” also suggests Morris’s interest in typographical impact
and weightiness. His letterforms are physical objects: heavy, slab-like, and
carved. They are made to be noticed. Their forcefulness stems from this po-
tent combination of historical models and nineteenth-century innovations,
270 Book History

Figure 10. William Morris’s pen drawing from an enlarged photograph of Leonar-
do Bruni’s Historiae Florentini populi (Venice: Jacobus Rubeus, 1476). Reproduced
in William Morris and the Kelmscott Press: An Exhibition Held in the Library of
Brown University (Providence: Brown University Library, 1960). Previously held in
the John M. Crawford Jr. collection; current location unknown.

possible through Walker’s enlargements of those valorized earlier printing

examples, modeled on handwriting. As McGann notes, Morris’s typograph-
ic choices act to “foreground textuality as such, turning words from means
to ends-in-themselves. The text here is hard to read, is too thick with its own
materialities.”81 Morris’s typefaces incorporated design elements from the
scribal hand, but the use of enlargements complicated human invention and
human error. In Oscar Wilde’s review for the sculpture lecture a week before
Walker’s talk, he wrote, “next week Mr. Emery Walker lectures on Printing.
We hope—indeed we are sure, that he will not forget that it is an art, or
rather it was an art once, and can be made so again.”82 The Kelmscott Press
emphatically declared printing to be an art.
Type designing is contingent upon technological imperatives. It is also a
physical act.83 For Morris, the process involved tracing from the enlarge-
ments and drawing and redrawing the letterforms, before they were repho-
tographed at a scaled down size. As May Morris relayed, he also carried
around smoked proofs in a matchbox. Smoked proofs were a standard de-
sign step, created by burning the face of existing type and imprinting that
“smoke” onto a piece of paper. This imprint can then be examined for flaws,
 William Morris and Technologies 271

or transferred onto a new piece of steel to cut a new punch that is the same
as the model. It is an intermediary moment between initial design and print-
ing. The act of turning scraps of paper in your hands to examine the smoked
letters is different, physically, than turning a piece of metal type in your
hands, but the impulse to move and arrange is the same. There is also a time
element inherent in this studied looking: tracing letterforms and examining
smokes is a luxury, one which many type designers could not have afforded.
This sort of careful leisureliness is also inherently opposed to capitalist print
production. In his 1896 lecture, Frank Colebrook pointed to the time-priv-
ilege of Morris’s printing: “The task requires time and patience. But Morris
never grudges time. ‘If it takes a fortnight we must get it so,’ he says. The
parallels must be perfect. I need not say there must not be any meandering
of white athwart the page owing to bad spacing. No one at the Kelmscott
would perpetrate such an outrage.”84 Enlargement technologies allowed for
this attention to detail, and the ability to slowly rework at various scales,
which was vital to Morris’s craftwork.
Larger pictures emerge from small details, and the larger picture for Mor-
ris’s printing is visual and physical. Pieces of type are difficult enough to
punch and to handle in the best of circumstances. They are minute, rela-
tively easy to break or wear down, and sometimes hard to read, especially
when composing backwards and upside down; the smoked proof was nec-
essary to assess the acceptability of the design. The already sizable diffi-
culty in seeing the letters was exacerbated by Morris’s weakening eyesight
in his later years. His eyeglasses are now located at Exeter College, Oxford,
along with the rest of the contents of his desk at his death, with lenses thick
enough to suggest optical difficulty.85 Modern typefaces and comparatively
grey text blocks became legible in the nineteenth century in a way that they
would not have been before, in part due to better eyeglasses and better light-
sources.86 While the enlargements allowed for close study and replication in
pursuit of typographic perfection, they were also a necessary aid for Morris,
a technological advancement that allowed him to be able to see at a larger
scale, and therefore to design. The enlargements were a facilitator, as part
of a localized process. Morris and Walker lived down the street from each
other in Hammersmith, and Morris drew inspiration from books that had
been in his library. Seeing these books in a different format—with the letters
dissected from their original context, projected as stand alone, sculptural
objects—was the impetus needed for Morris to turn to type design.
The photographic enlargements also speak to Morris’s relative privileges:
to have a well-connected and supportive friend like Emery Walker, to own
272 Book History

incunabula and manuscripts, to receive an Oxford education, and to amass

money and connections. At the same time, he was part of a much broader
printing and typographic community, and is now established as the revital-
izer of the fine press movement. In Peterson’s summary, Morris’s achieve-
ment ultimately was bringing together “the complaints and proposed rem-
edies being expressed by a number of his contemporaries, to give them a
unified intellectual framework, to communicate them with extraordinary
eloquence, and finally to carry his precepts out in action by producing a
series of stunningly beautiful books at the Kelmscott Press.”87 To this as-
sessment we must add that his achievements are contingent upon technol-
ogy—both his embrace of it, and critical response to it. Morris drew from a
photographic trace, a double removal from the original scribal hand. This
reworked method of handcrafting is a technology, too.
It is worth remembering that our experience of nineteenth-century print
on paper is really a trace rendered by another physical object, an inked piece
of metal. Type is technically “something that you can pick up and hold in
your hand. Bibliographers mostly belong to a class of people for whom it
is an abstraction: an unseen thing that leaves its mark on paper,” where
a typeface has come to mean “not the top surface of a piece of type, nor
even of many pieces of assembled type, but the mark made by that surface
inked and pressed into paper.”88 Trace was a key aspect of the enlargement
process, allowing for exact copying and then modification. “Madeness,” as
outlined by Joseph Leo Koerner on the concept of “factura,” the “aspect of
the thing,” is visible through an objects’ material history as both an action
and result of making.89 Ricketts despaired of modern type because it does
not “show the influence of formative processes, nor does it reveal any logic
in the anatomy of forms, nor does it have any special element of beauty.”90
What Ricketts wanted was the visual manifestations of formative processes,
as a way to prove care, learning, and practice. With William Morris’s Kelm-
scott Press types, we have the rare chance to see his formative process, and
the confluence of technological factors at play is an essential consideration
for any visual or bibliographical work on his printing. We can examine trac-
es and layerings of pens and photography: Morris’s actions, and the result.

Notes

This article owes a great debt to Emily George, Jeffrey Todd Knight, Sandra Kroupa, Matt
Poland, and Geoffrey Turnovsky, for their helpful feedback and suggestions. I am also grate-
ful to audiences at MLA and SHARP, and for the invaluable support and comradeship of the
William Morris Society and the Material Texts Colloquium at the University of Washington.
 William Morris and Technologies 273

1. Greta Lagro Potter, “An Appreciation of Sir Emery Walker,” Library Quarterly 8, no.
3 (July 1928): 400–14, 402.
2. Oscar Wilde, “Printing and Printers: Lecture at the Arts and Crafts,” Pall Mall Ga-
zette (16 November, 1888): 5–6, 5. The purpose of the lecture, put on by the Arts and Crafts
Exhibition Society, was to demonstrate and “direct attention to the processes employed in
the Arts and Crafts, and so to lay a foundation for a just appreciation both of the processes
themselves and of their importance as methods of expression in design.” “Talk in the Studio,”
Photographic News 32 (2 November 1888): 704.
3. William S. Peterson, “Introduction,” in The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the
Art of the Book, edited by William S. Peterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
xi-xxxv, xvii.
4. William S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 77. I am grateful to Peterson for printing Walker’s lecture notes, as Appendix B. John
Dreyfus also discussed the structure of Walker’s talk and some of the examples cited, in “Emery
Walker’s 1888 Lecture on Printing: A Reconstruction and a Reconsideration,” Craft History 1
(1988): 118–30.
5. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 78.
6. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 78.
7. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 78.
8. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 79.
9. Walter Crane, “William Morris,” Scribner’s Magazine 22 (July 1897): 88–99, 95.
10. Frank Colebrook, William Morris: Master-Printer, ed. William S. Peterson (Council
Bluffs, Iowa: Yellow Barn Press, 1989), 13.
11. H. Halliday Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris, Master-Craftsman
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1924), 30, 41.
12. John Dreyfus, “New Light on the Design of Types for the Kelmscott and Doves Press-
es,” Library 29 (1974): 36–41, 36. An extant volume of the enlargements contains a note from
Reed, “Enlarged photos of early Roman & Gothic type collected and presented to me by Wil-
liam Morris. 1891.” Reed further noted that “these types include the models upon which the
founts were designed for use in the Kelmscott Press.”
13. The Benton-Waldo machine very slightly preceded the Linotype machine, invented
by Ottmar Mergenthaler in the 1880s, and the Monotype machine, by Tolbert Lanston and
revised by John Sellers Bancroft in the 1890s; Warren Chappell and Robert Bringhurst, A Short
History of the Printed Word, 2nd ed. (Vancouver, B.C.: Hartley & Marks, 2000), 199. For more
on Benton and his work, see Patricia Cost, “Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton, and
Typemaking at ATF,” Printing History 16 (1994): 27–44.
14. Chappell and Bringhurst, Short History of the Printed Word, 225. Morris’s iron Al-
bion press is now at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
15. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 58.
16. The Typographical Adventure of William Morris (London: William Morris Society,
1957), 24.
17. John Dreyfus, “Morris and the Printed Book: A Reconsideration of his Views on Type
and Book Design in the Light of Later Computer-Aided Techniques,” Kelmscott Lecture, 1986,
12. As William S. Peterson also noted in “The Type-Designs of William Morris,” Journal of
the Printing Historical Society, no. 19–20 (1985–87): 5–18, the “use of the camera in copying
or adapting earlier typefaces has become so common in the twentieth century that we must
remind ourselves of its novelty in Morris’s day: I am not aware that any other type-designer
adopted such a technique before him,” 8.
18. Especially useful in establishing what Morris owned and what he was examining is the
critical bibliography of Morris’s library, by William S. and Sylvia Peterson (https://williammor-
rislibrary.wordpress.com).
274 Book History

19. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 82. In a non-exhaustive list, Peterson also discusses the
enlargement process in “The Type-Designs of William Morris,” particularly on pages 8 and
11, in A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), xxi–xxii, and
in Kelmscott Press, particularly 84–89. See also Dreyfus, “Emery Walker’s 1888 Lecture on
Printing,” 129, and Sparling, Kelmscott Press, 57–58.
20. Walker developed his method of process engraving from Alfred Dawson’s etching in-
struction at the Typographic Etching Co. R.C.H. Briggs, “Introduction,” in Typographical
Adventure of William Morris, 4–7, 4.
21. Dreyfus, “New Light on the Design of Types,” 36.
22. William Morris, “A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding The Kelmscott
Press: An Essay Published in 1896,” in The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Art of the
Book, ed. William S. Peterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 75–78, 76.
23. Dreyfus, “New Light on the Design of Types,” 41, quoting Emery Walker from 17
May 1917 in The Times Literary Supplement.
24. Colebrook continued, “The parrot imitates the sailor, and particularly imitates the
incidental blemishes of his conversation. Printerdom is not to be an earthly parrot-dise,” 25.
25. The comparison to Peter Schoeffer is particularly important, since Schoeffer was
trained as a scribe before switching to moveable type design under Gutenberg, eventually form-
ing his own printing dynasty. Colebrook described Morris’s interest in Gutenberg’s 42-line
Bible (c. 1455), identifying it as “the earliest book printed with moveable types… has many
features never been surpassed” (18).
26. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 92, and referenced in Briggs, “Typographical Adventure,”
6. The blackletter was ultimately a “freer and more skillful translation of his models.” Peterson
also notes that several of the lowercase Troy letters look a great deal like Schoeffer and Zainer.
27. Peterson, Ideal Book, xvi.
28. William Morris, “A Note by Morris on His Aims in Founding The Kelmscott Press,”
76.
29. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 82.
30. Charles Ricketts, “Of Typography and the Harmony of the Printed Page,” translated
from French by Richard K. Kellenberger, Colby Library Quarterly (November 1953): 194–
200, 198.
31. Ricketts, “Of Typography,” 196. As “heirs of the tradition of beautiful writing, they
had only to look back to the ancestral forms of letters used by the scribes of the tenth and
eleventh centuries, to arrive, in this process of purification, at the superior Italian typography
of the sixteenth century, which we call Roman and from which comes our modern typography,
through a process of corruption.”
32. Ricketts, “Of Typography,” 196.
33. Peterson, Ideal Book, xvi.
34. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 9.
35. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 327.
36. Edward Tenner, Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 190. “The steel pen helped make possible mass instruction in
writing, which would otherwise have exhausted teachers as it tormented geese” (191).
37. Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 329.
38. Typographical Adventure of William Morris, 23.
39. Megan L. Benton, “Typography and Gender: Remasculating the Modern Book,” in
Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, edited by Paul C. Gutjahr and
Megan L. Benton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 71–93, 71.
40. Benton, “Typography and Gender,” 72.
41. Peterson, The Ideal Book, xx. This breakdown is also evident in discussions about
Rococo art and architecture.
 William Morris and Technologies 275

42. Peterson, The Ideal Book, xx-xxi.

43. The association of handmaking with masculinity is counterintuitive, since other
“crafts” like embroidery and textile creation are often associated solely with women; one of
the many contradictions surrounding Morris’s practice.
44. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 84, 92. For more on Morris and slow printing, see Eliza-
beth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2013). The focus on “slowness” extended to paper; Colebrook
lamented that “Morris’s love for slow made hand-made paper reminds me that paper makers
are asked at this moment if they cannot increase their turn out from a maximum of about 300
feet of paper per minute to about 500 feet” (William Morris: Master-Printer, 29).
45. Dreyfus, “New Light on the Design of Types,” 37; Sparling, Kelmscott Press, 58.
46. It was not until the early twentieth century that photographic paper moved from
albumen-coated paper to chlorobromide papers, which were more conducive to enlargement. I
am grateful to Jennifer R. Henneman for illuminating conversations about these photographic
processes.
47. The ability to show comparative examples with slide projectors, as Walker did, has
had broader ramifications. Slide projectors have governed the structure of art history classes
since lantern slides made it possible for the discipline to flourish in an academic setting; Hein-
rich Wölfflin is usually credited as the first art historian to utilize two projectors at once,
allowing dual comparison of images. Joanna Drucker sees this as a limitation imposed by
technology, since “art historians laid out their slide lectures on the light table in complex arrays
of arguments and then had to compress the associative structure into side by side pairs to meet
the constraints of the slide projector,” yet for early art historians, it would have been new and
powerful. With the move from lantern slides to 35mm slides to PowerPoint, the dual imaging
born of two projectors no longer has to be the norm. Yet although the technology has changed,
many of us continue to teach with two images on the screen. See Joanna Drucker, Graphesis:
Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014),
189–90.
48. Dreyfus, “New Light on the Design of Types,” 37.
49. Sparling, Kelmscott Press, 57. Prince was working in a time-honored tradition and it
“could seem that punchcutting in his hands, though the instruments used might be of greater
precision, was essentially unchanged as a process from that followed through by Garamond.”
50. Peterson reproduces this drawing in Kelmscott Press, 85.
51. The seminal source on the nuances in the punchcutter-designer relationship is Pierre
Simon Fournier, Manuel Typographique (1764–1766), edited and translated by Harry Carter
(London: Soncino Press, 1930).
52. Many catalogs on Arts and Crafts art are printed in a faux-Morrisean style, as are
many critical bibliographies of Morris, a pertinent example of allusive typography’s continuing
appeal.
53. Stanley Morison, Letter Forms (Vancouver, B.C.: Hartley & Marks, 1997), 99.
54. Benton, “Typography and Gender,” 73. John Dreyfus argued that “Morris was far
too imbued with medieval attitudes towards creativity for him not to have some misgivings
about tackling type design” in the manner that he did, and that “some of his misgivings are rel-
evant to problems we meet today when using computer-aided and laser-technology to produce
type designs.” Dreyfus, “Morris and the Printed Book,” 12. In 1924 Henry Halliday Sparling
sniped “alike as readers, printers and letter-designers, we suffer from the typewriter, mechani-
cal compositor and their concomitants—to say nothing of the unloveliness of our usual sur-
roundings—which set up in us a subconscious barrier against the beauty we consciously seek,”
Sparling, Kelmscott Press, 13.
55. S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1974), 1.
276 Book History

56. Ruari McLean, Typography (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 9.
57. Wilde, “Printing and Printers,” 5.
58. These sorts of calligraphic guides became common in the 1520s, produced in Italy
by Italian writing masters, and served to spread Chancery script, a hand used by bureaucrats,
which remained a standard script until the nineteenth century; see Tenner, Our Own Devices,
189.
59. Other typefaces strongly based on handwriting certainly existed, like the sixteenth-
century French caractères de civilité, designed by Robert Granjon, but their purposes were very
different. Arrighi’s was in educational service to provide guidance about how to write, while
the caractères de civilité were actually cast to print. The caractères de civilité was an impractical
typeface, requiring a great deal of sorts, ligatures, and other tied letters, which often broke.
60. Bruce Rogers (1870–1957) was an influential American typographer who invented the
Centaur font, and his twentieth-century italic is named Arrighi, for example.
61. Chappell and Bringhurst, Short History of the Printed Word, 198. “Different sorts
of quills were tested,” including “horn and tortoise shell… sometimes reinforced with gold or
other metal and tipped with a scrap of precious stone.”
62. As Tenner notes, 1.5 million steel nibs could be made from a ton of steel; in one ex-
ample, Joseph Gillott, a Birmingham manufacturer, was shipping 62 million steel nibs a year in
the 1840s (Tenner, Our Own Devices, 190).
63. Tenner quotes part of George Pratt’s poem “A Pen of Steel,” which is, remarkably,
about steel pens and engraving: “Give me a pen of steel! / Away with the gray goose-quill! / I
will grave the thoughts I feel / With a fiery heart and will” (Tenner, Our Own Devices, 190).
Ricketts also claimed that by the time of Aldus, typography had “lost track of the work of the
pen in an insipid or hasty purification of form at the hands of the engraver,” and since steel
nibbed pens are similar in shape and affect to burins, this comparison seems particularly salient
(Ricketts, “Of Typography,” 196).
64. Sparling described Bodoni thus: “[I]ts thins were thinned until they were skinnily
mean, and its thicks thickened until they were potbellied” (Kelmscott Press, 25).
65. Chappell and Bringhurst, Short History of the Printed Word, 198. The axis of letters
also changed, from “the axis of the forearm (which is normally oblique) to the axis of the pull-
stroke (which is usually directly towards the body).”
66. Chappell and Bringhurst, Short History of the Printed Word, 224, and Peterson,
“Type-Designs of William Morris,” 6.
67. Peterson, Ideal Book, xvi.
68. Jerome McGann, “‘A Thing to Mind’: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris,”
Huntington Library Quarterly 55, no. 1 (Winter 1992), 55–74, 58.
69. Peterson charitably describes this tendency to drop works as the process of “an excep-
tionally busy man [who] was also notoriously impatient when confronted with time-consum-
ing tasks”; Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 64.
70. McGann, “‘A Thing to Mind’”, 65.
71. Peterson, A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, 18.
72. Crane, “William Morris,” 95.
73. Crane, “William Morris,” 95.
74. Peterson, “Type-Designs of William Morris, 11.
75. Peterson, Kelmscott Press, 62.
76. Morris, “A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press,”
75.
77. Susan Otis Thompson, American Book Design and William Morris (New York: R. R.
Bowker Company, 1977), 35. Even in the nineteenth century the costs were prohibitive enough
that the books were more likely bought by a wealthy clientele.
78. Thompson, American Book Design, 66.
 William Morris and Technologies 277

79. Morris, “A Note by William Morris on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press,”
75–76.
80. Beatrice Warde’s famous essay “The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should Be Invisible”
details how, in successful printing, the typography of a text should not even register to the
reader, but should be subsumed to the content. The typography should appear so seamless that
the reader should be able to ignore it entirely. See Warde, The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays
on Typography (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1956).
81. McGann, “‘A Thing to Mind,’” 72.
82. Oscar Wilde, “Sculpture at the Arts and Crafts,” Pall Mall Gazette, London (9 No-
vember 1888): 3–4, 3.
83. Typographic terminology describes parts of letterforms as feet, arms, shoulders, necks,
and faces. This linguistic borrowing reinforces the links between our physical bodies and the
letters.
84. Colebrook, William Morris, 17.
85. John Dreyfus wrote convincingly in “The Invention of Spectacles and the Advent of
Printing,” Library, Sixth Series, 10, no. 2 (June 1988): 93–106, about the trajectory of eye-
glasses from the thirteenth century onwards, and how developments in glass, metal, optical
knowledge, and scientific inquiry all changed how we saw then and how we see now. Being able
to see better with the enlargements is a practical consideration here.
86. Legibility is about the material objects, but it is also about the habits and expectations
of readers. The physical act of reading changed as smaller books were mass produced cheaply,
and people changed reading positions to be able to see them better, holding books close to their
face instead of propping them on a slanted desk. These smaller books become more legible
through both these physical actions and the use of more sophisticated lightsources. See Tenner,
Our Own Devices, especially “Chapter Eight: Letter Perfect?”
87. Peterson, Ideal Book, xxi.
88. Harry Carter, A View of Early Typography up to About 1600 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1969), 5.
89. Joseph Leo Koerner, “Editorial: Factura,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Au-
tumn 1999): 5–19, especially 9–10.
90. Ricketts, “Of Typography,” 197.