Object Type
This is an unfinished and unused design for a page layout for the poem Maud by Alfred Lord Tennyson. William Morris added a hand-painted border design to a proof page of type and wood-engraved initial. The border has a narrow left margin to sit next to a title page decorated with a similar border with narrow right margin.

The painted border design would be reproduced as a woodcut in the finished book. During the 19th century it was usual for the artist to make the drawing and a professional engraver to cut the design into the block of boxwood. Morris' designs for borders and initials were wood-engraved by W.H. Hooper, C.E. Keates and W. Spielmeyer.



Design & Designing

Morris himself carefully designed initial letters, borders and typefaces for book issued by the Kelmscott Press. The borders for Maud were specially designed for the work, but this border was not used in the finished book. The typeface used in this book was called Golden after the book for which it was first designed in 1892, the Golden Legend. In the finished version Morris printed the first page of this poem as prose to make the layout neater.



People

William Morris set up the Kelmscott Press in 1891. Morris was a key figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement and central to the Pre-Raphaelite artistic circle. Inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts and early printed books, he set up the Kelmscott Press in order to meet his aesthetic ideal of integrated design, in particular unified illustration and text.