The revival of art of the book. William Morris

It is very sad that gluttonous machines nowadays forced out from our memories that mechanism, which, despite its imperfections, was amazing. I am talking now about the mechanism of creating book on manual presses.

It seems that with mechanisation of the main productions, printing houses lost their soul and inspiration. In a pursuit of immediate and steady profit publishers and printers for whom the XIX century became time of fantastic enrichment, have forgotten  about the laws of creation of book. When new owners of life, who were very precisely called nouveau riches "the new rich man" wanted to decorate interiors of their magnificent mansions with book shelves, printers were publishing books for them in hard covers, plentifully and tastelessly decorated by a gold stamping. Often, in decoration of these books took part great artists, but their works were just mechanically inserted into the book blocks. Because of that, all illustrations were not in harmony with font, and with the book's story also.

William Morris passionately liked books. He wanted to revive art of the book. Morris believed that the machine industry and art of the book are incompatible. He had one main dream of up classing life and making human life wonderful. William Morris had a lot of practices in calligraphy, he did a lot of research and payed a lot of attention to paper, type of letters, intervals between letters, words and lines, and also he was spending a lot of time on creating his own ornaments for decoration of the book, of the story inside. For Morris was important that font had to be original, he wanted letters to be of a clear form, strict, but without unnecessary over decorations.

I really like the way he was thinking about book. William Morris thought about book as about the piece of art with a sence, soul and one in its origin. I am amazed by the fact how much time he dedicated to drawing all ornaments by himself, they are so beautiful, all with a link to nature, as you can see on two pictures on the right side ( these are cover and inside page from book "A book of verse", by William Morris, 1870 ). This book's cover and inside page are wonderful, the font and ornaments go so well with each other, just by looking at these pictures you can feel what this book is about. For example, I feel something light, beautiful, full of love and pure. Morris had really great graphic skills, because it is a hard work to transmit visually feeling of the book to people. Also, if you take a look at pictures on the bottom, ( these are inside pages from book "The wood beyond the world", by William Morris, 1894 ) you will see that in this book William Morris used different font and ornament, these things create a special atmosphere to the book. I like the fact that he was spending so much time considering types of fonts, whether they fit to the ornament or not, I think that it is extremely important, because not only plot of the book makes sense, but also its visual inside, and when you see text, pictures or drawings, which have relation between, which go great together, you are visually pleased and all book and story inside make sense. I like Morris's carefulness about font, as you can see on the right bottom picture ( it is a detailed picture of inside page of book "The wood beyond the world", by William Morris, 1894 ) there is a text, and there are some small leaves right in the text, I find this idea very interesting. Morris continues his ornament inside of the text, so that they are one common thing, they are continuous, they have a meaning and they must fit together, if not – all feeling and meaning of book will have no sence anymore.



















Bibliography:
Book, where I just found out more information about arts and crafts overall: "The arts and crafts movement" by Steven Adams, 1987
All pictures are taken from the official website for the William Morris Archive: http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu


             
by Elizaveta Mamedova