A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ROMANCE TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM MORRIS
AND PUBLISHED BY THE KELMSCOTT PRESS IN AN EDITION OF 515 COPIES
MORRIS, William (translator). Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile. Hammersmith: ‘printed by […] William Morris at the Kelmscott Press […]. Sold by William Morris, at the Kelmscott Press’, 1894.
Sextodecimo in 8s (146 x 105mm), pp. [4 (blank ll.)], [4 (title, verso blank, blank, additional title)], [1]-66, 67 (colophon), [1 (blank)], [4 (blank ll.)]. Printed in Chaucer type in red and black. 2 full wood-engraved borders and three-, seven-, and thirteen-line wood-engraved initials, all after Morris. (Unobtrusive light marginal spotting.) Original holland-backed boards [by J. & J. Leighton], upper board titled in black. (Boards slightly marked, extremities slightly rubbed and bumped, causing short splits and chipping on spine.) A very good copy in the original binding. Provenance: Henry Sotheran Ltd, London (late-20th-/early-21st-century bookseller’s ticket on upper pastedown).
First edition, one of 500 copies on ‘Perch’ paper from an edition of 515 copies. Sparling wrote that William Morris had found L. Moland and C. d’Héricault’s edition of Nouvelles françaises en prose de xiiie siècle publiées d’après les manuscrits (Paris, 1856) ‘from its first appearance […] a familiar friend and a source of inspiration’ (H.H. Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris Master-Craftsman (London, 1924), p. 108), while Mackail states that it ‘had for thirty years been one of the treasures of literature to him. Together with the “Violier des Histoires Romaines,” which appeared in the same series two years later, it had been among the first sources of his knowledge of the French romance of the Middle Ages’ (J.W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (London, 1899), II, p. 283). Morris undertook a number of translations from Nouvelles françaises en prose de xiiie siècle, and four of these stories –The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane (1893), Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile, and the two stories The Tale of the Emperor Coustans and of Over Sea (1894) – were published by the Kelmscott Press as a series of three volumes in a uniform sextodecimo format (this format was first used by Morris for Gothic Architecture in 1893). These translations were later collected in one volume, which was published under the title Old French Romances Done into English by William Morris by George Allen in 1896.
The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane, the first of the Kelmscott Press translations, was printed in an edition of 365 copies, but evidently was well received, since the print run was increased to 515 for Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile. In the printed announcement of the forthcoming publication of the work (probably written by Morris), it is stated that ‘[t]his tale dates from about the same period as that of King Florus, and its literary & historical value is equally high. As in the case of King Florus, the Englishing is literal’ (quoted in Peterson).
Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile was completed on 13 March 1894, according to the colophon, and published on 4 April 1894 in an edition of 515 copies. 500 copies were printed on ‘Perch’ paper (as here) and priced at 7s. 6d., and 15 copies were printed on vellum and priced at 30s. This copy was acquired by the previous 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).
E. Le Mire, Bibliography of William Morris, A-70.01; W.S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press (1985), A23.
£1,795
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