ONE OF 1,500 COPIES PRINTED ON AN ALBION PRESS AT THE ARTS AND CRAFTS EXHIBITION SOCIETY’S EXHIBITION
AT THE NEW GALLERY IN OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1893
MORRIS, William. Gothic Architecture: A Lecture for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Hammersmith: ‘printed by the Kelmscott Press during the Arts and Crafts Exhibition at the New Gallery […]. Sold by William Morris, Kelmscott Press’, 1893.
Sextodecimo in 8s (142 x 100mm), pp. [2 (title, verso blank)], 68, [4 (blank ll.)]. Printed in Golden type in red and black. Four- and six-line wood-engraved initials after Morris. (A few light marginal spots.) Original holland-backed boards [by J. & J. Leighton], upper board titled in black and with a leaf ornament. (Spine slightly darkened and with short splits, boards slightly marked and rubbed at extremities.) A very good copy in the original binding. Provenance: Edward John Sidebotham MRCS (1860-1929, armorial bookplate on upper pastedown) – Henry Sotheran Ltd, London (late-20th-/early-21st-century bookseller’s ticket and pencilled notes on upper pastedown).
First edition, second or third impression, one of 1,500 copies on ‘Flower’ paper from an edition of 1,545 copies. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society had been founded in 1888, and Morris & Co. were regular exhibitors, with Morris himself lecturing and providing practical demonstrations at the exhibitions. Morris’s lecture on Gothic architecture was originally delivered at the Society’s exhibition at London’s New Gallery in 1889, and preparations to publish it as a Kelmscott Press book began in August 1893. During the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society’s annual exhibition at the New Gallery in October to November 1893, an Albion press from the Kelmscott Press was installed in the gallery and Gothic Architecture, ‘which had been set up at the Press, was printed in public, under the eyes of an interested and constantly renewed crowd, whose presence imposed a severe strain upon the pressman Collins’s Celtic modesty. This “moving exhibit” formed one of the salient attractions of the Exhibition’ (H.H. Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris Master-Craftsman (London, 1924), p. 87).
Gothic Architecture was the first of six Kelmscott Press books produced ‘in this small but elegant format’ (Parry) and the first Kelmscott Press book to employ the four-line initials. Three impressions (presumably of 500 copies each) were printed, forming the first edition of 1,500 copies on paper (priced at 2s. 6d.) and 45 copies on vellum (priced at 10s. during the exhibition and 15s. afterwards) – an ‘exceptionally high figure for a Kelmscott edition’ (loc. cit.). The first copies were issued on 21 October 1893 and the first impression of 500 copies included the misprints ‘gild’ for ‘guild’ (p. 41) and ‘Van Eyk’ for ‘Van Eyck’ (p. 45). Peterson notes that (as here) these errors were corrected in the second and third impressions (although Le Mire states, possibly erroneously, that ‘the 2nd state has only the 1st error corrected; and the 3rd state has both errors corrected’).
This copy was previously in the library of the physician and academic Edward J. Sidebotham, who spent much of his professional life in Manchester, where he was also involved with the committees of the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester Art Gallery. The volume was later acquired by its most recent owner from Henry Sotheran Ltd, the longest-established active antiquarian bookseller in England, which counted William Morris among its clients (cf. W.S. Peterson, Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, p. 20).
A Bookman’s Catalogue: The Norman Colbeck Collection, p. 584; E. Le Mire, Bibliography of William Morris, A-66.01;L. Parry (ed.), William Morris, O.21; W.S. Peterson, Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press (1985), A18.
£695
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