KELMSCOTT PRESS: MORRIS, William.

£5,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Poems by the Way. First edition of the second Kelmscott Press book, the first printed in two colours and featuring the smaller printer's mark. This is one of 300 copies on paper.Printing began in July 1891 and continued through summer; writing his diary on 7 August, William Scawen Blunt recorded how he "Lunched at Kelmscott House where Mrs Morris took me to see the printing. Morris's own poems were being struck off, most beautiful they are with their rubrics." The book used 59 initial letters, "for the most part suggestive of the ornament in Italian manuscripts of the fifteenth century", many of which were later discarded (Cockerell, p. 15). Morris was "so pleased with his new printer's mark that he used it twice: at the end of the table of contents and on the colophon page" (Peterson, p. 7).

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