16mo, (145 x 105 mm). 1 ff., 68 pp. One of 45 copies printed on vellum. Printed in Morris’s Golden type in black and red, with woodcut initials throughout. Original holland-backed boards, front cover lettered in black, edges untrimmed; hused in a custom brown quarter morocco slipcase and chemise, binding fresh, if a little shaken. Front pastedown slightly marked and warped, as often, discreet repair to rear pastedown, a very attractive copy.

The text originated as a lecture delivered by Morris to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at the New Gallery in Regent Street in November 1889. Four years later its publication became part of an Arts and Crafts exhibition in its own right: work on the book began at Hammersmith before the press and its craftsmen were transferred to the New Gallery, where printing was demonstrated before the visiting public. Sparling recalled that it was printed “under the eyes of an interested and constantly renewed crowd,” the spectators placing a considerable strain on the modesty of the pressman, William Bowden Collins. The printing press and the process of making the book thus became exhibits alongside the finished works of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The circumstances of its production were particularly appropriate to Morris’s argument. For him, Gothic was important not simply as an architectural style but as evidence of a society in which the arts could exist cooperatively. Architecture, he argues, should be understood as a “harmonious co-operative work of art,” embracing sculpture, painting, ornament, and the other serious arts within a unified whole. Works of art were, in turn, an expression of the value placed upon human life and labour.

Morris consequently presents Gothic architecture as the antithesis of both classical imitation and the division of labour of modern industrial society. Its achievement lay in the freedom allowed to the craftsman and in a method of construction that developed organically from material, purpose, and workmanship. Gothic had, in his words, “shaken off the fetters of Greek superstition & aristocracy, and Roman pedantry”; its rules were followed freely rather than mechanically, allowing variation, ornament, and individual invention to become part of the structure itself.

The lecture therefore belongs as much to Morris’s social thought as to his writings on architecture. His defence of Gothic was inseparable from his conviction that meaningful art depended upon meaningful work. The revival he sought was not the archaeological reproduction of medieval buildings, but the recovery of the conditions under which craftsmen could once again take pleasure and responsibility in what they made. Towards the end of the lecture he turns from medieval architecture to contemporary society, arguing that dissatisfaction with the ugliness of the industrial world itself offered grounds for optimism: “Art cannot be dead so long as we feel the lack of it.”

The Kelmscott edition gives that argument an unusually direct material expression. Printed in Morris’s own Golden type, with initials designed for the Press, and produced as visitors watched the craftsmen at work, Gothic Architecture joined subject, typography, craftsmanship, and method of production in a single object. In the 45 vellum copies, the correspondence between Morris’s theory of the integrated work of art and the physical book is especially pronounced. The Morgan Library likewise records the vellum issue separately within the edition and holds one of the 45 copies.

Provenance: Philip Hanson Hiss, with his morocco bookplate; Leroy Arthur Sugarman, with his morocco bookplate; Jules Max Samson, with ownership stamp.

Peterson, A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, A18; H. Halliday Sparling, The Kelmscott Press and William Morris Master-Craftsman, 1924, pp. 87, 155.