Word: kelmscott
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Connective Tissue. He was the greatest designer of his age. Morris' workshops at Red House and Kelmscott offered as radical a challenge to English mass fabrication with its textiles, furniture and printed papers as, 70 years later, the Bauhaus would present to industrial manufacture in the 20th century. As book printer, weaver of tapestries, furniture designer and stained-glass worker, Morris consistently turned out the best work of anyone in Victorian England. Moreover, he was one of the century's major social thinkers...
...last words were: "I want to get mum-bo-jumbo out of the world." He had put a good deal into it. His vision of a materialist Utopia with an art-craft peasantry, and Morris himself dancing on the greensward, bordered on the ridiculous. The masterpiece printed by his Kelmscott Press was a massive edition of Chaucer, illustrated by himself and the painter Burne-Jones. It cost ? 20- probably the equivalent of a half-year's wages of one of the men who toiled in the Devonshire copper mine from which Morris derived his fortune...
...Bernard Shaw but briefly married another seedy socialist comrade of Morris, grew a mustache and took up with an androgynous lady who wore tweed knickerbockers. In later life she took to impersonating the catatonic lady of Shalott and became both custodian of and exhibit at the Morris shrine at Kelmscott Manor...
Branching Out. In London, as an art student, Yeats began to hear professorial excitement over the vowel sounds ("I scarcely knew what a vowel was") in his Innisfree. He talked to Shaw and Kropotkin and William Morris at Kelmscott House; to Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson and Edmund Dulac-the "tragic generation" of the fin-de-siècle-at the Rhymers' Club; to John Todhunter and the intense young clerks of the Southwark Irish Society...
...native of Lafayette, Ind. (where he was an art-classmate at Purdue of George Ade and John T. McCutcheon), Bruce Rogers decided on book-designing instead of painting when he saw the first books of William Morris' famed Kelmscott Press. In the '90s, when Bruce Rogers started his career, U. S. books were as dingily printed as they were apt to be turgidly written. They provided an aesthetic sensation for readers not unlike that of walking along a muddy road in the dark. Bruce Rogers' imaginative, lucid, unaffected craftsmanship let air and light into book pages. Other...