- -Commentary by Nicolas Barker, editor of The Book Collector and retired Head of Conservation, British Library
-Letters, drawings, and other items formerly loose in the volume
-Magnify up to 300%
- -Digital images of every page of this rare book, cover to cover, in full color, presented as uncropped spreads
-Print and Thumbnails files for creating printed references
-Adobe Reader 3.01 with Search software
-PDF file on CD-ROM with all of Adobe Reader’s viewing, navigation, and search features
-Octavo Digital Guide and Help files
-
- Adobe Reader 5.0 or later (available free from Adobe)
- Windows PC with Pentium processor running Windows 95 or later
- Macintosh Power Mac running OS 9.2, or OS X 10.1 or later. Linux 2.2 kernel on X86 computer
- Color Monitor (15" or larger, capable of displaying millions of colors recommended)
- CD-ROM drive
William Morris, poet, painter, calligrapher, printer,
and Utopian fabulist, had the surest grasp of any modern designer
of the bonds that unite words and decoration into a single graphic form.
He spent a lifetime attempting to revive the hand crafts, designing
stained glass, textiles, wallpaper, and furniture. In 1888, he founded
the Kelmscott Press to bring together his taste for medieval literature
and early methods of book production. This great folio edition of Chaucer’s
works was Kelmscott’s masterpiece.
Morris obtained permission from Oxford University Press to use their authoritative Chaucer text, developed handmade paper from pure linen rags, and had his printer obtain a specific stiff, black German ink. With type especially cut to imitate the best made in the fifteenth century, and illustrations by Morris’ friend, the great Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, these dense pages have a wonderful unity. The book is, as Morris intended, “essentially a work of art”; it is also the greatest monument to the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, as well as a lasting embodiment of the complex aesthetics of the Victorian era.
The Octavo Edition reproduces Burne-Jones’ own beautifully bound copy, along with manuscript letters and drawings preserved with it.
The original book imaged for this digital edition:
17 1/8 x 12 inches (435 x 305 mm)
Morris obtained permission from Oxford University Press to use their authoritative Chaucer text, developed handmade paper from pure linen rags, and had his printer obtain a specific stiff, black German ink. With type especially cut to imitate the best made in the fifteenth century, and illustrations by Morris’ friend, the great Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, these dense pages have a wonderful unity. The book is, as Morris intended, “essentially a work of art”; it is also the greatest monument to the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, as well as a lasting embodiment of the complex aesthetics of the Victorian era.
The Octavo Edition reproduces Burne-Jones’ own beautifully bound copy, along with manuscript letters and drawings preserved with it.
The original book imaged for this digital edition:
17 1/8 x 12 inches (435 x 305 mm)
Darting Daughter
The Arts and Crafts movement is epitomized by William Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer with its symbolic themes, hand-crafted type, and stylized woodcut illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. The copy photographed for Octavo’s Edition was Burne-Jones’ own, which he decoratively inscribed and gave to his daughter, Margaret. Margaret Burne-Jones was the incarnation of the Burne-Jones maiden. She had been educated at home and in her father’s studio, eventually replacing her mother to become the favorite model of Burne-Jones’ later years; her features are immortalized as the sleeping princess in his “Rose Briar” series. Their increasingly obsessive relationship came to an end, to Burne-Jones’s ill-concealed resentment, when she married in 1888 the classicist (and later government administrator) John William Mackail. Margaret Mackail retained into old age something of the ethereal distance of the women in her father’s allegorical paintings. Her lifelong friend, W. Graham Robertson, described her in a letter of 1936 as one “whose paths were always in the great waters and whose footsteps were never known if she could possibly help it… As a rule, she would die rather than tell you what she was going to have for dinner… ”
The Arts and Crafts movement is epitomized by William Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer with its symbolic themes, hand-crafted type, and stylized woodcut illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. The copy photographed for Octavo’s Edition was Burne-Jones’ own, which he decoratively inscribed and gave to his daughter, Margaret. Margaret Burne-Jones was the incarnation of the Burne-Jones maiden. She had been educated at home and in her father’s studio, eventually replacing her mother to become the favorite model of Burne-Jones’ later years; her features are immortalized as the sleeping princess in his “Rose Briar” series. Their increasingly obsessive relationship came to an end, to Burne-Jones’s ill-concealed resentment, when she married in 1888 the classicist (and later government administrator) John William Mackail. Margaret Mackail retained into old age something of the ethereal distance of the women in her father’s allegorical paintings. Her lifelong friend, W. Graham Robertson, described her in a letter of 1936 as one “whose paths were always in the great waters and whose footsteps were never known if she could possibly help it… As a rule, she would die rather than tell you what she was going to have for dinner… ”
Shavian Shoptalk
In a 1946 postcard from playwright George Bernard Shaw to famous English bookman Sydney Cockerell, Shaw bemoans the lack of books produced by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press: “The scarcity of the Kelmscotts and Ashendenes exasperates me. What good are they if nobody except a few rich collectors ever see them?...Is it not possible to form a company to obtain a subscription list of public libraries and private individuals willing to buy photographic reproductions of the best work of the private presses, and then to manufacture such photostats. I possess facsimiles of the Shakespeare folios; and nobody has ever contended that they did any harm beyond setting a few Baconians making ciphers from them.”
– Quote from The Best of Friends, Further Letters To Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. Viola Meynell (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956).
In a 1946 postcard from playwright George Bernard Shaw to famous English bookman Sydney Cockerell, Shaw bemoans the lack of books produced by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press: “The scarcity of the Kelmscotts and Ashendenes exasperates me. What good are they if nobody except a few rich collectors ever see them?...Is it not possible to form a company to obtain a subscription list of public libraries and private individuals willing to buy photographic reproductions of the best work of the private presses, and then to manufacture such photostats. I possess facsimiles of the Shakespeare folios; and nobody has ever contended that they did any harm beyond setting a few Baconians making ciphers from them.”
– Quote from The Best of Friends, Further Letters To Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, ed. Viola Meynell (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956).
Swooning Swinburne
Bridwell Library’s copy of William Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer originally contained several loose items found stuck between the pages. These were presumably placed there by Margaret Mackail, recipient of this particular copy from her father, the illustrator of the work, Edward Burne-Jones. Among the loose items were photographs of Morris and Burne-Jones, sketches by and letters from Burne-Jones, and a remarkable letter from English poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne to Burne-Jones in July, 1896. In his letter, Swinburne writes his “thousand thanks” for the “magnificent gift” of the Chaucer and continues: “When the meridional glow of genius is tempered by the cordial urbanity – if I may be allowed that endearing praise – of friendship, the emotions evoked are such as now animate the (shall I say?) labouring bosom of… Yours ever devotedly, Al Swinburne.” You can view all the loose items in Octavo’s Edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Works Now Newly Imprinted by the Kelmscott Press.
Bridwell Library’s copy of William Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer originally contained several loose items found stuck between the pages. These were presumably placed there by Margaret Mackail, recipient of this particular copy from her father, the illustrator of the work, Edward Burne-Jones. Among the loose items were photographs of Morris and Burne-Jones, sketches by and letters from Burne-Jones, and a remarkable letter from English poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne to Burne-Jones in July, 1896. In his letter, Swinburne writes his “thousand thanks” for the “magnificent gift” of the Chaucer and continues: “When the meridional glow of genius is tempered by the cordial urbanity – if I may be allowed that endearing praise – of friendship, the emotions evoked are such as now animate the (shall I say?) labouring bosom of… Yours ever devotedly, Al Swinburne.” You can view all the loose items in Octavo’s Edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Works Now Newly Imprinted by the Kelmscott Press.
Copyright © 1998-2005 Octavo. All rights reserved.
Send us your comments and questions.
Send us your comments and questions.
