The Kelmscott Chaucer: Making Morris's Greatest Book

The short answer, and what the records do not settle

If you have come for a full production history of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the honest position is this: the sources on file, chiefly the Victoria and Albert Museum's account of the Kelmscott Press, document the press thoroughly but do not describe the Chaucer directly. No publication date, illustration count or typeface assignment for the book can be drawn from them. Rather than fill those gaps from memory, this page keeps to what the records support and flags the rest.

That still leaves a great deal of solid ground. The press's founding, its output, its typefaces, its division of labour and its commercial record are all documented, and together they explain how a book as ambitious as the Chaucer became possible. The Kelmscott Press guide covers that history in full; here we work through the evidence section by section.

The press behind the book: Hammersmith, 1891

The Victoria and Albert Museum dates the founding of the Kelmscott Press to 1891, in a building a minute's walk from Morris's home in Hammersmith. The location mattered. Morris was in his late fifties, and keeping the press within a short walk of his house let him supervise the work closely while continuing his other commitments.

The press ran for five years, until Morris's death in 1896, and in that time it published 66 titles, again according to the V&A. Morris himself wrote 23 of the press's books. The others consisted mainly of either medieval works in translation or contemporary poetry, which gives a clear sense of the press's reading world: it was built around the literature Morris cared about most.

The output was small by any commercial standard. Across all 66 titles, the press's total production was only 22,068 copies, a figure the V&A records. That is an average of a few hundred copies per title, and it reflects the press's character as a maker of carefully produced books rather than a mass publisher. Any large-scale project undertaken there, including the Chaucer, worked within these constraints of scale and hand production.

How a Kelmscott book was made

The V&A's account of the press's methods shows how much of the work Morris took on himself. He carefully designed the press's bespoke typefaces, first Golden and then Troy, along with the initial letters, borders, ornaments, frames for illustrations, title pages and printer's marks. A Kelmscott book was not a text handed to a trade printer. It was an integrated design, and Morris was the designer of nearly every element around the words.

Illustrations were the exception. The V&A notes that Morris was conscious of his limitations as a figurative artist and relied on other people to design illustrations, with major contributions from Edward Burne-Jones. This division of labour is one of the defining features of the press: Morris built the book's structure and surface, and trusted a close collaborator with the pictures. For more on the letterforms themselves, see the page on Kelmscott typefaces.

A worked example shows the process in practice. The Golden Legend wood engraving, held by the V&A, was designed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, engraved by William Harcourt Hooper, and printed by the Kelmscott Press in 1892 in England. Three named hands, one image: design, engraving and printing were distinct skills, and the museum record credits each separately. This is the kind of documented attribution chain that a full account of the Chaucer's illustrations would need, and it is exactly what the sources on file do not yet provide for that book.

Why Morris printed books at all

The phrase comes from the V&A's account of his aims, and it captures the ambition plainly: these were books judged first as made objects, with their type, paper, ink and layout treated as a single design problem.

The models he looked to were historical. According to the V&A, Morris sought to recreate the rich visual texture he admired in books printed in the second half of the 15th century, the earliest decades of European printing. He was also committed to balancing his love of medieval style with readability, although the museum notes that the Kelmscott type style looks very dense to modern eyes. The tension between historical effect and ease of reading runs through everything the press made.

The impulse went back a long way. The V&A records that it was the illuminated manuscripts Morris saw in Canterbury Cathedral as a boy that ignited his enthusiasm for historical texts. As a student at Oxford, his enthusiasm was fuelled by regular visits to the Bodleian Library, and after graduating he made his own attempts at decorating manuscripts. The press was, in part, the industrial-scale descendant of that early handwork. More on Morris's calligraphy can be found on the page on his illuminated manuscripts.

There was also a critical motive. The V&A describes Morris as looking for an antidote to, as he saw it, the ugliness of the newly industrial world. The press's historical models sat within a wider current: the museum notes that Morris was influenced by the Gothic Revival, a 19th-century fashion that looked back to medieval forms and patterns, exemplified by Owen Jones and Noel Humphreys' Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages of 1844. The Kelmscott books gave that revival its most complete expression in print.

Commerce, sales and influence

It is easy to imagine the Kelmscott Press as a purely idealistic venture, but the V&A's record says otherwise. Morris was very focused on making the press commercially viable, since profit earned him freedom to work as he wanted. The business side was not a compromise of the ideals; it was what made the ideals sustainable.

The method worked. The V&A records that good marketing and relationships with booksellers, collectors and librarians ensured impressive sales, with most editions subscribed in advance. Selling books before they were printed reduced risk on expensive productions and built a committed audience for each new title. A costly undertaking like the Chaucer would have depended on exactly this system of advance subscription.

The press's afterlife has been significant. In the V&A's judgement, the clearly stated design principles of Kelmscott Press books were influential on later typographers and secured the press a significant place in the history of British book design. That influence is an interpretation, and it belongs to the museum rather than to this page, but it explains why the press's books, the Chaucer among them, continue to be studied as objects of design history and not only as texts.

What we cannot yet confirm about the Chaucer itself

Because no source on file describes the Kelmscott Chaucer directly, several questions that readers naturally bring to this book remain open here. They are worth listing plainly, so that the limits of the current evidence are as clear as its strengths.

The following points cannot be confirmed from the sources on file:

• The book's publication date and the dates of its production.
• The number and content of its illustrations, and the full extent of Burne-Jones's contribution to them.
• Which of the press's typefaces were used for it, and how its borders and initials were arranged.
• Any verbatim statement by Morris about the Chaucer. The only Morris quotation in the evidence concerns books having a definite claim to beauty, not this book in particular.
• Which surviving examples best illustrate the book. The V&A objects cited here are Golden Legend engravings, and the connection between the press's other documented outputs and the Chaucer is not stated in the evidence.

None of this means the questions are unanswerable, only that answering them requires sources beyond those on file for this page. The Kelmscott Press history sets out the documented record of the press in full, and the typeface guide covers the Golden and Troy letterforms that any account of the Chaucer's typography would need to engage with.