Gdy typografia (współ)stanowi o treści. Późne romanse prozą Williama Morrisa wydawane w Kelmscott Press

Typography of Kelmscott Press, a private publishing house founded by William Morris that functioned between 1891 and 1898, alludes, on many levels, to the era of incunabula. That fact is a realisation of the aesthetic views of Morris himself, who believed that the art of printing achieved its pinnacle in the 1470s and deteriorated as soon as the beginning of the subsequent century. Techniques used, typefaces based on the Venetian Antiqua and Rotunda, vignettes inspired by German incunabula, as well as xylography, can all be described as a compromise between the desire to imitate Medieval patterns and both the practical concerns and the needs of the 19th-century audience. The same phenomena apply to Morris’ works written during the publishing house’s operational years, the so-called late prose romances – their genealogical pattern is formed by Late Medieval chivalric romances. However, both their contents and language were modified in accordance with Morris’s views and the sensibilities of contemporary readers. A deep coherence exists between Kelmscott Press typography and the late prose romances – in both of these cases, the point of reference is the 15th century, the era of William Caxton and Thomas Malory.