Kelmscott Press founded by William Morris
Background
Before Morris founded the Kelmscott Press, he had a strong interest in book design. Morris and Burne-Johes both admired illuminated manuscripts, and visited the Bodleian Library often to admire them. They also admired the works of Chaucer and Dürer. Morris carefully studied the techniques of the illuminators and the woodblock carvers in hopes of reviving that type of craftsmanship. Morris had some experience in contributing to and designing books before he founded the Kelmscott Press. He designed and illuminated books by hand, starting in 1870 with an anthology of his own poetry, A Book of Verse. He designed as well as wrote The House of Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890); he also designed The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue (1891). He had plans to make a richly illustrated version of his epic poem, The Earthly Paradise. He abandoned the project, but surviving trial pages show that the typefaces and illustrations are "incompatible".Morris was not merely trying to replicate 15th-century printing practices. He preferred the iron hand-press of the 19th century to the medieval wooden ones, because the weaker wooden presses had to print on wet paper to get a print from a woodblock. Printing on wet paper weakened the press and subsequently, the book itself. Conveniently, iron hand-presses were still readily available in the 1890s. While modern rotary presses focused on speed and affordability, Morris did not. Some book dealers and designers disliked the newly popular, poorly-produced books. Talbot Baines Reed, in an 1890 lecture on typography at the Society of Arts, complained that new typefaces were thin, harsh, and lacking dignity compared to old-face typefaces like Caslon and those of Nicholas Jenson. Morris expressed similar opinions.