ANALISIS Y INTERPRETACIÓN
EL RITUAL PUEDE SER RECONOCIDO POR EL PATRIMONIO CULTURAL DEL ECUADOR
In order to rescue the book from the damage done by industrial manufacture in the name of efficiency, Morris felt he had to make changes at the level of the very cellulose fibres that hold the page together. Cellulose is “‘found in nature as the cell walls of plants’ in the form
of minute threads which have certain remarkable properties” (McLean T&H 94). According
to Ruari McLean, these “fibres vary greatly in size, strength and exact nature from plant to plant, and in ease of extraction” (94). Wood chips, rag made of cotton or linen, straw, bamboo, mulberry bark, nettles, and esparto grass have long cellulose fibres that hold the paper’s ingredients together once formed into a sheet (94). The longer the cellulose, the stronger the paper; most vegetable matter has cellulose fibre, but much of it is not long enough to support a quality paper. For the Kelmscott book, in order to be worthy of works by Chaucer and Ruskin, the structure had to withstand the wear and tear of time.
Machine-made papers for mass-produced books were, for Morris, typically difficult to read with a dull “grey page” that obscured the print (IB 68, 72). Many nineteenth-century
bookmakers turned to acidic papers made from either mechanical or chemical wood pulp mixed with esparto grass due to an increasing demand for books and the rising cost of
handmade papers (McKitterick “Changes” 94-95, 104; Altick 277). David McKitterick notes how the Royal Society of Arts complained that the paper used in these books “was easily marked and next to impossible to repair satisfactorily” (104).
The problem was the ingredients used to make paper at the end of the nineteenth century: chemically treated wood-chips. Earlier in the century, paper’s dominant ingredient was rag—literally cotton and linen rags discarded by members of the public and collected by paper manufacturers from the dust heaps. However, by the late-nineteenth century, only the more expensive papers were pure rag content. Since the financial crisis of the 1820s, paper
costs (i.e. rag costs) rose due to an increase in market demand that coincided with a decrease in supply (McKitterick “Changes” 92). In other words, there were more and more readers as the century progressed and not enough cheap cotton rag to keep up with growing demand. As a result, experiments began to arise that sought cheaper sources of paper. McLean indicates that these cheaper mechanical or chemical pulps were “the result of grinding de-barked wood logs on a grindstone under a stream of water, which fragments the fibres” (McLean T&H 97).
Manufacturers began to rely more frequently on wood pulp mixed in with their rags in order to make the more expensive rag material spread further over more products. Wood pulp did not make a quality paper (McKitterick “Changes” 95). Only newspapers, penny magazines, and other forms of print that had expected short life spans would use 100% wood pulp. Most papermakers would use wood pulp mixed with cotton, linen, or esparto grass in order to make a better quality, low-cost paper for the book trade. However, few of these books survive. Acidification of the low-quality, chemically-processed wood-chip paper has erased most books published for wider markets from the mid- to late-nineteenth century in Britain from the surviving archive (McKitterick “Introduction” 16-17). In other words, books became disposable. While a democratisation of reading occurred with books becoming available to an increasingly wider and economically diverse market, something was lost in quality as suppliers attempted to meet demand.
D. C. Coleman points out how, before mechanised papermaking, England, like other countries, saw a rise in Paper Making Associations which would train individuals for
positions as skilled tradesmen, able to command wages through their guild’s rules. However, such organisations were on the wane as early as the 1820s and 1830s. Members with “Cards of Freedom” numbered 3,000 in 1825 but only 700 by 1874, “of which 420 worked in the nineteen vat mills which remained in the country” (Coleman 285). Skilled vat men earned
anywhere from 14s to 30s. per week in 1820s Northumberland and Durham, while machine mill labourers as early as the 1840s in Scotland earned in the range of 10s to 18s per week with children earning even less (302). Subsistence wages, substandard work conditions, and the repetitive efforts of menial labour resulted in an unmotivated and disinterested labour force. Morris understood this degradation of the working class as the root cause of a market glut of poor-quality cheap books.
IMAGE REMOVED FROM PUBLISHED DISSERTATION FOR COPYRIGHT PURPOSES
Fig. 1-3 Example of the Kelmscott Press's quality paper. From The Earthly Paradise, Volume 1 (1896).
Note the edges of the paper where the density is visible. This is a quality linen paper that stands in opposition to the cheaper wood pulp papers. Permission Pending Harry Ransom Center, Austin TX.
Kelmscott operated in the midst of this papermaking revolution. Never had so many options existed before, even options without acidic wood pulp. Yet Morris was still
unsatisfied. His solution for the Kelmscott book was to buy his supplies only from producers of hand-made paper. This is why he turned to Joseph Batchelor & Son in 1890 to make the paper for The Story of the Glittering Plain. Morris had the paper used by Kelmscott books
made entirely of linen, based on a fifteenth-century pattern from northern Italy taken from Morris’s sample of Bolognese paper dated to 1473 (see fig. 1-5 for an example). Morris’s insistence on linen suggests a return to old methods of bookmaking that stressed quality over efficiency. Pure rag was the only option for Morris who sought, anachronistically, to abide by the standards and practices of medieval artisan culture (McLean T&H 98). Morris could
find no other papermaker in the whole of England who made hand-made paper that he
approved of; as a result, he turned to Batchelor & Son as his sole paper supplier for the life of the Kelmscott Press (Thompson 160).
Batchelor & Son would go on to design three watermarks exclusively for Kelmscott books: “Primrose” or “Flower,” “Perch,” and “Apple,” marking the page as a Kelmscott creation and eliminating the papermaker’s credit from their handmade paper (Kelvin “Letter 1779”, 223-n225). Morris imprints his mark paratextually onto the page; every part of the book is his creation. Batchelor & Son enabled Morris’s singular vision; however, by always turning to his own preferences, he creates an artificial harmony – a return to the rough-hewn quality of middle-English artisanship based entirely on Morris’s idea of the beautiful.
With his handmade paper secured, Morris arranged for Henry Baud of Brentford, Middlesex to produce his vellum editions and Jaenecke of Hanover to produce his ink. While Morris would have preferred to work with all English suppliers, the quality of his ink, and the use of linseed oil in its making, were more important to him than its nationality (Thompson 160). He would not allow, for example, chemical treatments for removing oils from inks. Instead, he insisted on the use of stale bread and raw onions to remove grease in the ink’s production. The product then had to be “matured” for “six months, after which the organic animal lampblack [the type of oil being burned] was ground into the mixture” (Thompson 161). While Morris did not directly control the means of production, relying on secondary suppliers, he managed to oversee and narrate a story of quality and design with Kelmscott’s material assembly.
The page, densely stamped with his golden type and designs that smothered the white page and ivory vellum with its dark black ink, is an attempt to focus the reader’s eye on the book’s literary content. The materiality leaves no space for marginalia. The page is so
elaborate, one fears damaging its unified effect by scrawling in the margins. The margin, as I will argue in more detail in Chapter 2, plays an important role in reading; it allows room for pencilled notes so that we can remember our reactions to themes and metaphors that emerge and allow for subjective interpretation. At least with chapter and book openings, Morris fills every crevice with a large typeface, red marginal paratext, and foliage: Morris’s hand fills the margins. White space, spaces where there is room for disagreement, are filled with the dark and strong voice of Kelmscott’s black ink imposing an interpretation onto the reader; it is a book without any compromise to reader interpretation.
The very lettering of a Kelmscott book visually interprets the literary content. Morris created three different founts of type, that is, type design punched into metal and used by his printers at both Chiswick and Kelmscott. First it was the Troy and Chaucer types “based on the clearest model which he knew, the Mainz Bible printed by Peter Schoeffer in 1462, which was ‘simpler, rounder, and less spiky’ than most Gothic scripts” (Thompson 161). Respectively these were his large and small sizes of a gothic “black letter” type that Morris felt were more readable than the Roman types typical since the invention of the Caslon type in the eighteenth century (161). He then improved on these types with his Golden type in 1891, which is what he used in most of the Kelmscott books (161).
Chiswick Press was the initial choice for Kelmscott printing needs before Morris’s purchase of an Albion hand press in January 1891 (Kelvin n247). It was also the choice printer for Morris’s trustees after his death. From Chiswick’s accounting ledgers, we can see evidence of Morris’s hand and the costs incurred due to the quality of paper he required for his works. For example, Chiswick ledgers show that they charged Morris £16.2.6 in 1890 to print seventy-five paper and three vellum copies of The Story of Gunnlaug. This included a
Morris was willing to reduce profits in order to create his ideal book.6 Such large costs for a limited print run suggest that Morris’s ideas were potentially marketable. As a means of comparison, Chiswick Press charged equivalent prices to print Leonard Smithers’s edition of Oscar Wilde’s anonymously published Ballad of Reading Gaol. Reading Gaol cost £12.8.3
for an initial run of 430 copies (thirty printed on Japanese vellum on Chiswick’s own handmade paper), and £11.8.6 for an additional reprint on February 8th, only days after the first print run. The third printing of Reading Gaol cost another £12.19.0.7 These costs,
considering the material differences and the nature of the work (popular ballad poetry versus academic lecture series), indicates that the investment in material production was worth it due to expectations of high return in the market for Morris’s works.
For William Morris, creative revision was necessary in order to accomplish a subversive approach to the marketplace and economics. His books were a singular, authoritative representation of the ideal book, beautiful by his standards. Where he had to revise his ideals in order to retain a successful business in the Victorian economy, Kelmscott was the one project where he would not bend to anyone else’s needs. For Kelmscott, Morris demanded that the consumers revise their conception of beauty and pay for the quality craftsmanship he was offering. Papermakers, ink manufacturers, and printers would have to change their modern methods if they wanted to help Morris make his beautiful books. This authoritarian model was the only way that Morris saw for achieving his ideals. He was fortunate to be in a financial and social position to make such demands and see his ideals come to fruition. Not everyone who designed beautiful books was in such a position. The queer book emerges when Aesthetes, who admired Morris’s beautiful books, wanted to create equally beautiful works but, instead of being able to demand changes to the production process from printers or publishers, instead of demanding high prices from the consumer,
they needed to redeploy or queer their conception of what they considered beautiful. This queer conception of the beautiful book resulted in new ideas about the modern bookmaking and, in some instances, generated queer books.