First Kelmscott Press edition, limited to 500 sets on ‘Flower’ paper. Caxton’s translation of The Golden Legend was originally intended to be the first book published by the Kelmscott Press, and Morris designed the ‘Golden’ typeface specifically for the purpose. Due to problems with paper quality and supply, however, the Kelmscott Press edition of Morris’s own Story of the Glittering Plain was both the first book issued by the Press and the first appearance of the ‘Golden’ type. ¶¶

The Golden Legend was assembled by Jacobus de Voragine in the second half of the thirteenth century, and this important medieval hagiology held a strong appeal for William Morris (at his death Morris owned at least ten early editions of the work). Although numerous texts by Caxton had been reprinted by the Early English Text Society in the 1870s and 1880s, the only nineteenth-century reprinting of The Golden Legend was an incomplete edition by the Holbein Society which appeared in 1878. F.S. Ellis, the editor of this edition, explained the significance of the work in his explanatory notes at the end of the third volume: ‘Among the books which serve to illustrate the religious life and mode of thought that prevailed in the middle ages, none holds a more important place than the “Legenda Aurea”’ (p. 1282). Ellis’s daughter, Phillis, undertook the immense task of transcribing the text from Caxton’s 1483 first edition, borrowed from Cambridge University Library. ¶¶

The two full-page wood-engravings in this edition were Edward Burne-Jones’s first illustrations for the Kelmscott Press – illustrations which characterised so much of the press’s output and culminated in Burne-Jones’s 87 illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer in 1896. The artist’s final contributions were two wood-engravings for the penultimate publication of the Kelmscott Press, Love is Enough, or the Freeing of Pharamond, issued in December 1897 – a few months before Burne-Jones’s death in June 1898. ¶¶

To publish The Golden Legend, Morris collaborated with the bookseller and publisher Bernard Quaritch, and the edition was originally intended to be 250 sets, although this was later doubled to 500 printed on ‘flower’ paper made by Joseph Batchelor and Son for the Kelmscott Press (the lack of suitable vellum meant that, despite a short-lived plan to approach the Pope for supplies, the work was only printed on paper). In a letter to Ellis dated 6 September 1890, prior to the establishment of the Kelmscott Press in January 1891, Quaritch agreed to bear the entire cost of producing the work, whilst giving Morris complete control over choice of paper and printer; in return, Morris and Ellis agreed to receive no remuneration other than twelve free copies each. ¶¶

The publication of the Kelmscott Golden Legend on 3 November 1892 was met with widespread acclaim, and it was reviewed favourably in The Times and The Library. Morris himself wrote to Quaritch that he was ‘proud of it, and of having pushed it through so promptly’ (Peterson, Bibliography, p. 23), and the poet A.C. Swinburne called it, ‘the most superbly beautiful book that ever, I should think, came from any press’ (W.S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press (Berkeley, CA, 1991), p. 216). ¶¶

W.S. Peterson, Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press (1985), A7. ¶¶¶

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