The Millinery Works GALLERY

THE ARTS & CRAFTS LIBRARY

A Selling Exhibition - presented by The Antique Trader

6 - 25 June 2006

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Illustrated above exhibits 7, 8, 9, 11, 55, 57, 61

The true university of these days...

“Somewhere in the dawn of childhood was The Book; the wind would rustle through its pages and the pictures would rise. Page after page floated in the air and gently saturated the landscape with brightness. The Book”

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz & Jerzy Ficowski, 
adapted by Theatre de Complicite.

The pioneering Welsh cultural commentator Raymond Williams has noted that the first half of the 19th century was the moment of change following two thousand years when writing was known only to a minority.

And once the battle to print freely had been won and as the barriers, both political and technical, to large scale printing were gradually overcome the very nature of books and libraries took on a distinctly important role.

It is worth remembering that Francis Place, the nineteenth-century political activist and tailor, had orders cancelled by wealthy clients who could not stomach the idea of a mere tailor like him possessing more than 1000 books.

And as the century progressed technological advances facilitated larger print runs at affordable prices, especially at the cheaper end of the market and for magazine illustration, with the development of stereotyping and electrotyping. From the 1860s, colour printing in relief reached a height of popularity in book illustration, as artists such as Walter Crane found it to be a simple and efficient means of reproduction. 

No longer the preserve of the very wealthy and the church, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the growth of the private library on a scale never seen before.

Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish author, essayist and historian, whose early ideas influenced both Ruskin and Morris and whose suggestion that “the true university of these days is a collection of books” was adopted on the Tabard Inn bookcase, captured one of the key reasons for this growth when he wrote ‘the best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity’.

This revolution in book ownership heralded a similar transformation in our relationship with books. An emerging symbiosis that knowledge was power and that knowledge was to be found in books made them, for many, treasured possessions. 

It is not without reason that the Kelmscott Press was for William Morris his most successful achievement. As E P Thompson, perhaps Morris’s greatest biographer, has written: ‘The Press was simply a source of delight and relaxation, in which his craft as designer and his craft as writer both found expression’

This exhibition sets out to highlight how, with the growth of literacy levels and affordable access to literature, a special relationship developed with books and the place we house them, the library, capturing the warm personal stamp that books, bookcases, shelves and desks add to any living space, turning it into a part of a home.

It also seeks to illustrate how the hugely influential Arts & Crafts movement responded to the housing of Carlyle’s ‘real university’; how, with its usual zeal it set about designing and producing everything from the font and type-face through to the binding, the bookcase, the writing desk and the reading lamp.

With examples that span the movement from its beginnings in the Gothic Revival through to the meticulous craft-workers and designers of the Cotswold school and beyond the exhibition illustrates why one of the most employed mottoes of the period was ‘choose an author as you choose a friend’.

Jeff Jackson ©

To continue with catalogue open the book    

For further details email paul@millineryworks.co.uk

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