First edition, one of 525 copies on ‘Perch’ paper from an edition of 545 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 these Kelmscott Press translations, was printed in an edition of 350 paper copies, and was evidently well received, since the print run was increased to 500 paper copies for Of the Friendship of Amis and Amile and remained at a similar level for The Tale of the Emperor Coustans and of Over Sea, the last of the three volumes in the series. The most substantial of the three volumes, The Tale of the Emperor Coustans and of Over Sea contains two stories, each with its own wood-engraved part-title giving the fuller titles ‘The Tale of King Coustans Emperor of Byzance’ and ‘A Tale of Over Sea’ (the latter also has a letterpress part-title). Interestingly, Sparling notes that ‘[f]rom the story of the Emperor Coustans grew that of “The Man born to be King”, one of the poems included in [Morris’s] The Earthly Paradise’ (The Kelmscott Press and William Morris Master-Craftsman, p. 108); similarly, Morris’s poem ‘Amys and Amillion’, intended for The Earthly Paradise but eventually omitted, had been based on the text he translated as Amis and Amile. ¶¶

The Tale of the Emperor Coustans and of Over Sea was completed on 30 August 1894, according to the colophon, and published on 26 September 1894 in an edition of 545 copies. 525 copies were printed on ‘Perch’ paper (as here) and priced at 7s. 6d., and 20 copies were printed on vellum and priced at 2 guineas. 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-73.01; W.S. Peterson, The Kelmscott Press (1985), A26. ¶¶¶

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