Synopsis "Bibliography of William Morris (in English)"
This work is the first full account in over a hundred years of William Morris's extensive writings. This bibliography gives close attention not only to what those writings are and when or by whom they were issued, but also to the ways by which they reached the public. The 'descriptive' aspect of the work, comprising detail taken from the books themselves considered as physical objects, provides the 'direct' evidence of how the books were made. Here, this is combined with the fullest possible account of what descriptive bibliographers like W.W. Gregg or Fredson Bowers call the 'collateral' evidence: information from trade journals, correspondence, printers' or publishers' archives and financial accounts, newspapers, diaries, histories, and bibliographies that bear on the process of publication and sometimes on the text itself. From these resources it is possible to illuminate the personal, commercial, legal, technological, aesthetic, and political influences affecting the emergence of the enormous body of literature that constitutes the Morris oeuvre. It is in the effort to combine true bibliographical description with the life of Morris and the histories of Victorian publishing, copyright, politics, and book design, printing, and construction that this bibliography breaks new ground, providing a resource not only to students of Morris but also to historians, economists, political scientists, bibliographers, students of the decorativeans, and book collectors.The research that underpins this study began in 1989, and it comes from libraries and private collections from five countries on three continents, Australia, North America, and Europe, and the libraries used, cited in the List of Abbreviations and in the various entries, number fifty-two, the private collections seven. The major accomplishment of the book, however, lies not in its many sources but in the way its parts are fitted together to form a picture of a major writer's work.
