Cowan 2015

Yuri Cowan. "Translation, Collaboration, and Reception: Editing Caxton for the Kelmscott Press." To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris's Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams. Ed. Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2015. Web.

• William Morris
• 149 ...few have discussed the content of Kelmscott books, preferring to discuss the books' aesthetic qualities.
• intervention ...describe the ways in which the Kelmscott editions of the C15 pioneering English printer William Caxton are representative of Morris's simultaneous stance of receptivity and creativity with regard to the relics of the medieval past.
  • Caxton mentioned Febvre & Martin 1958 p. 182, more extensively in Dane 2012
• 149-50 artifacts of collaboration between printers, authors, translators (and the past), as well as "Morris's ideal of creative praxis, embodying a dialogue between multiple creators and their audiences that occurred and continues to occur across time."
  • can this be used as a framework for his literary output too, e.g., "Defense of Guinevere"?
• highlighting the necessary multiple agency behind book objects beyond just "Caxton" or "Morris": "In each of his projects Morris was willing to rely on the expertise of those close to him; in methods, artistic works, and utopian modes of social organization, he rarely regarded anything as final; and above all he recognized and valued the diversity of the art of the past, appreciating each surviving work for its individual aesthetic and historical significance, finding a place for it in his own aesthetic catalogue of exemplars, and reconstituting it after his own fashion and in his own preferred media."
  • connects to Miller 2013 on the politics of Morris's aesthetic work
• translation as a linguistic but also a temporal model
• 150-1 Morris's process of the creation of a Kelmscott book as a work of "popular art":
  • "activist reading that assimilates past artistic and literary models"
  • "creative process aimed at making the physical book both beautiful and readable."
  • "dissemination that seeks to make books of historical or intellectual interest accessible and appealing" (again Miller 2013: radical newspaper on same political spectrum as Kelmscott, but at a different end of the distributional spectrum)
• Gerard's Herbal (London, 1597) inspiration for floral designs
• 151 ...Morris "refuse[d] translation in its total sense." Morris according to [Marcus] Waithe was invested in highlighting the distinctive nature of the translated text's previous iterations, since they represented an "authentic strangeness" that needed to be "accommodated" by both the translator and the reader - thus accounting, incidentally, for Morris's retention of what now look like archaisms and etymological fallacies.
  • l/u Marcus Waithe, William Morris's Utopia of Strangers
• intellectual collaboration in the print shop: Eisenstein 1979's model of the early printer's shop as intellectual center, critiqued by Grafton 1980, perhaps more illustrative of Morris's Kelmscott Press
• 152 ...the printed word is a material experience for Morris, instinct with history and evocative of the circumstances of its creation.
  • he references McGann, "A Thing to Mind: The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris"
• 153 imagining "the multiple Latin texts and books existing beyond this particular textual state of Maidstone's translation [of Psalmi Penitentiales]": "This multiplicity of texts is another good reason to be wary of suggesting that Morris was engaged in imprisoning his 'original' medieval texts in a definitive modern printed form. Instead, we might think of this corpus of texts as composed of iterations and reiterations, existing and coexisting in a way like palimpsests, overlapping and abutting[.]"
• l/u Morris's "The Ideal Book," "Architecture and History"
• 153-4 he says Morris's sociality "undermines stereotypes of the solitary immersion of a "rare books collector" in his library," but to some extent Morris had to have been exceptional
• 154 The historicist project of the Kelmscott Press was an earnest re-sending of old books to new readers, like translating the relics of the past from one physical location to another.
  • another temporal model of engagement with the past in addition to Scott and analogy Griffiths 2016
• 155 The practice of editing at the Press was thus a kind of textual performance...Behind Caxton's words [in the preface to his ed of The Golden Legend] lie the medieval notion of the unfinished work: the idea that the author or maker of a book is sending an imperfect text on to future readers who may do with it what they please so long as they continue to improve it, just as Morris himself engaged in what William S. Peterson describes as a "painstaking procedure of tracing, drawing, and redrawing photographs" of numerous early typefaces.
  • Anna Wager has worked on photographs of typefaces in Morris's work
  • Morris's lax attitude toward intellectual property linked to this medieval-influenced sense of contingent, unfinished "originality" (at odds with the prevailing IP regime in St Clair 2004)