News from Nowhere online

The illustrated online text of Morris’s News from Nowhere is now updated and available at http://www.uiowa.edu/~wmorris/NewsFromNowhere/.

The online version is designed to help students and others visualize Guest’s London and his travels through Nowhere. What did the subway which Guest so hated look like in 1890? The Hammersmith Bridge of the time? Thornycroft’s factory? The Houses of Parliament? Westminster Abbey? Trafalgar Square? What was the “Guest House”? The “Old House for New Folk”? The scenes which the rowers viewed as they followed the Thames upriver? The likely site of the final feast in the small country church?

This edition is designed to make Morris’s critique of the old world and vision of the new more accessible and enjoyable for 2012 readers. We welcome comments and suggestions for additions, which should be sent to florence-boos@uiowa.edu.

“William Morris’ Earthly Paradise: Precursor to the Private Press Movement”

The exhibition, “William Morris’ Earthly Paradise: Precursor to the Private Press Movement,” will open at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art History Gallery 8 March 2012.  This exhibition, curated by Leslie Harwood, a MA candidate at the University, will focus on William Morris’s and Edward Burne-Jones’s Earthly Paradise project in relation to the Kelmscott Press, founded nearly thirty years after the Earthly Paradise project was initiated, in order to prove that the failure of the earlier project to be the instigator in the founding of the Kelmscott Press.

This exhibition will feature several editions of Morris’s Earthly Paradise, the 1868

mass produced edition featuring only one of Burne-Jones’s woodcuts, the 1896 Kelmscott Press edition, and Arthur Richard Dufty’s 1974 reproduction of the “Cupid and Psyche” series, which was printed with Burne-Jones’s original wood blocks. Dufty’s reproduction offers his own interpretation of how Morris intended to design The Earthly Paradise. The exhibition will also feature several books printed at the Kelmscott Press such as William Morris’s News From Nowhere and Well at the World’s End.

Alongside Morris’ books from the Kelmscott Press, several private presses influenced by the press at Kelmscott will be featured, including the Vale Press, Essex House Press, and Golden Cockerel Press, all in London. There will also be two American private presses, the Philosophers Press and the Elston Press. The aims of the exhibition are to discuss Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s intentions, the reasons why they founded the Kelmscott Press, and how the aforementioned private presses continued the legacy of Morris’s ideals in presenting the book as a quality, aesthetically pleasing everyday object.

A catalogue for the exhibition written by Ms. Harwood is available for purchase; for details please contact leslie.harwood@gmail.com.

The William Morris Society-US announces the awarding of 2012 Fellowships

The 2012 William Morris Society Fellowship was awarded to Leslie Harwood, a MA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Art History and Museum Studies. The award will help fund the installation of Ms. Harwood’s thesis exhibition entitled “William Morris’ Earthly Paradise: Precursor to the Private Press Movement” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art History Gallery, opening 8 March 2012.  The award will also be applied towards the printing of a thesis exhibition catalog offered to all of the visitors of the gallery free of charge. The catalogs, as well as the exhibition itself, will educate the UW-Milwaukee community and the greater public about William Morris’s profound impact on the Kelmscott Press and the press’s greater influence on the history of the Private Press Movement. For more information on the exhibition, see additional blog postings.

The 2012 Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial Fellowship was awarded to Kyle Stoneman, a PhD candidate at Churchill College, Cambridge. Mr. Stoneman will be investigating the artistic contributions of Evelyn Waugh, including his art criticism, illustrations, photography, and woodcuts, and how this work embraces William Morris’s theories. Waugh’s criticism of modern society’s social and aesthetic standards all resonate with the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement.