Honest Craft (Morris)

In the printing workshop of Kelmscott House in the 1890s, William Morris was designing a book. Not merely selecting a font or approving a layout: designing, in the sense of making every decision himself, from the proportions of the typeface he had cut in pencil on large sheets of paper to the weight of the handmade paper from Joseph Batchelor's mill to the density of the ink he had mixed himself and tested against the paper's specific absorbency. The decisions were interconnected in ways that only someone who had made them all could understand: the ink density that worked on one paper weight failed on another, the letter spacing that looked right in proof looked wrong in the book, the margin that seemed generous in isolation became cramped when the page faced its verso. The book that emerged from this process was different from a book produced