Private press movement

also: private press

movement c. 1890-1930 United Kingdom Europe

The private press movement was the turn-of-the-twentieth-century revival of hand bookmaking, usually dated from William Morris's founding of the Kelmscott Press in 1890, after a printing lecture by Emery Walker at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Morris argued that industrial mechanization had ruined the joy of work and brought ugliness with it; his answer was to treat the book as a designed whole - custom typefaces, hand-set pages, fine paper, ornamental borders, hand binding - made by traditional methods in small editions. The Doves Press and Ashendene Press refined the ideal of the pure, harmonious page, and the movement carried the Arts and Crafts creed of craft-as-art into the twentieth century.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Hand-set metal type printed sheet by sheet on hand-operated presses
  • Custom-designed typefaces in the humanist tradition (Golden Type, Doves Type)
  • Heavy handmade paper, generous margins and harmonious text-block pages
  • Ornamental borders, initials and woodcut decoration integrated with the text
  • Hand binding in leather with gold tooling
  • Small, often numbered editions treating book, type and binding as one design

Key figures

  • William Morris (1834-1896) — Founder of the Kelmscott Press (1890) whose books launched the movement
  • Emery Walker (1851-1933) — Printer whose 1888 printing lecture inspired Morris; co-founder of the Doves Press
  • T. J. Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922) — Binder and typographer who ran the Doves Bindery and the Doves Press with Walker

Example works

Sources

← Back to the catalog