The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Now Newly Imprinted
William Morris (Illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (English, 1833-1898); Engraved by William Harcourt Hooper (English, 1834-1912))
1896
- Medium
- Hand-printed book on Batchelor linen paper, bound with tooled white pigskin on oak board
- Classification
- Book
- Dimensions
- 44.5 × 36 × 7 cm (17 9/16 × 14 3/16 × 2 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- England
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries Special Collections
- Credit line
- Purchased with funds provided by Martin A. Ryerson in 1919
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Now Newly Imprinted is the magnum opus of the artist William Morris, a prominent figure in the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. The book is popularly known as the Kelmscott Chaucer because it was printed at the Kelmscott Press founded by Morris. The Kelmscott Press epitomized Morris’s appreciation for quality and sophisticated design, construction, and hand-printing skills at risk of being lost to mechanization. He created at least three of the typefaces present in the book in addition to the enlarged initials and the borders that embellish the pages throughout the text. The black and red typeface, named “Chaucer,” was meant to imitate early English fonts while remaining legible to 19th-century audiences. Morris made design choices assiduously, even taking care to ensure that the book’s ink was created without contemporary chemicals so that it would more closely resemble the ink quality in medieval books. Morris’s friend and collaborator Edward Burne-Jones provided the drawings for the 87 wood engravings cut by William Harcourt Hooper to print the illustrations. The original edition of 425 copies was printed in 1896; this copy is one…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
