Borders and Initials of the Kelmscott Press

A Press Built Around Ornament

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 press was not a sideline. It was the culmination of a long engagement with books, calligraphy and page decoration that Morris had pursued for decades before he ever set type.

Morris was explicit about what he wanted the press to produce. That phrase matters for anyone studying the borders. Ornament was not applied afterwards to fill gaps. It was part of the claim itself, a deliberate component of how a Kelmscott page was meant to look and to be judged.

For the wider story of the press, its books and its later influence, our guide to the Kelmscott Press covers the full history. This page stays with one element of it: the borders and initials, what the record says about them, and what it does not.

What Morris Designed for the Pages

The Victoria and Albert Museum's account is clear that Morris took charge of the decorative apparatus himself. It states that he carefully designed the press's bespoke typefaces, first Golden and then Troy, along with initial letters, borders, ornaments, frames for illustrations, title pages and printer's marks. Borders sit in that list alongside the typefaces, which is the right way to see them. On a Kelmscott page, text, initial, border and ornament were conceived as one composition rather than as separate layers.

The division of labour is just as well documented. The V&A notes that Morris relied on other people to design the illustrations, because he was conscious of his limitations as a figurative artist. Edward Burne-Jones made major contributions to the Kelmscott illustrations, collaborating with Morris across the press's output.

So the components of a Kelmscott page break down like this, according to the V&A:

• Typefaces: Golden and then Troy, designed by Morris.
• Decorative apparatus: initial letters, borders, ornaments, frames for illustrations, title pages and printer's marks, all designed by Morris.
• Illustrations: designed by others, with Burne-Jones the major contributor.

Where the Border Style Came From

The V&A traces Morris's aim in the press to the books he admired: he sought to recreate the rich visual texture he saw in printing from the second half of the 15th century. That is the documented context for the borders. Dense, dark, fully integrated page decoration was the goal, and the borders were one of the tools that produced it.

The skill behind them had a long apprenticeship. The museum records that Morris's calligraphic experiments of the 1870s taught him about the shapes of letters and about the decoration and illustration of text pages. Those lessons fed directly into the borders and initials of the 1890s. Readers who want that earlier phase in detail can find more on Morris's calligraphy in our separate study.

Two other documented threads lead to the press. The V&A dates Morris's editorship of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine to 1856, which brought him into contact with the printer Charles Whittingham of the Chiswick Press. And it records his commitment to balancing his love of medieval style with readability. The borders belong to that balance too. They carry the medieval effect, but they had to work on a printed page that people could actually read.

The Scale of the Output

How many books carried these borders? The Victoria and Albert Museum gives the figures. The press published 66 titles in the five years until Morris's death in 1896, and its total output for those 66 titles was only 22,068 copies. Every one of those books passed through the decorative scheme Morris had drawn for it.

The V&A also records that Morris wrote 23 of Kelmscott's books, with the rest consisting mainly of either medieval works in translation or contemporary poetry. That mix shaped how the borders were used, since the same apparatus of initials and ornament served both the medieval texts and the modern ones.

One documented example shows the collaboration behind the illustrations that sat within these pages. According to the V&A, the Golden Legend wood engraving was designed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, engraved by William Harcourt Hooper, and printed by the Kelmscott Press in 1892 in England. For the most famous of all Kelmscott collaborations, see the story of the Kelmscott Chaucer, where Morris's decoration and Burne-Jones's illustrations reached their fullest extent.

What the Record Does Not Tell Us

A study of Kelmscott borders runs into real limits, and it is more useful to name them than to paper over them. The sources behind this page, chiefly the Victoria and Albert Museum's account of the press, do not name individual border designs or give their dates. They do not describe the botanical or zoological content of the borders in any detail, and they do not explain how specific borders were assigned to specific books or title pages.

Concretely, the following are not established by the record used here:

• Names and dates of individual border designs and initial letters.
• Any list of specific Kelmscott books showing specific named borders.
• Identification of plant or animal forms in the borders, from any source.
• Any statement by Morris himself about the borders. No such quotation appears in this record.
• Any published interpretation of the borders' meaning or effect, by a named author.

The rule applied throughout this journal is that interpretation needs a named author and symbolism needs a stated source. Neither exists here for the Kelmscott borders. What the record does establish is who drew them, what they were for, and what tradition they answered to.

The Borders' Place in Book Design History

The Victoria and Albert Museum offers a judgement on the press's afterlife. Its design principles, it says, were influential on later typographers and secured it a significant place in the history of British book design. The borders and initials belong to that judgement. They were the visible surface of the principles, the part any reader of a Kelmscott book saw first.

For readers drawn to Morris's ornament on the page, our William Morris original designs collection includes work from the wider pattern-making career that the press drew on.