Cleveland Museum of Art

The Kelmscott Press was the most famous venture of William Morris, a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. Although the press existed only seven years, it produced limited editions of 53 books of great beauty and design. Morris's goal was to exceed the quality of 15th-century incunabula, or books printed before 1500. He took painstaking care in all aspects of book production including selection of paper, form of type, spacing of letters, and the position of printed matter on the page. The most renowned title in the Kelmscott bibliography is The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, which scholars and collectors consistently place in the category of the most beautiful of books. The Ingalls Library owns an almost complete set of Kelmscott Press books that were donated by Julia Morgan Marlatt upon her death in 1939.