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  • A Bibliography of William Morris
  • Mark James (bio)
A Bibliography of William Morris. By Eugene D. LeMire. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library. 2006. lxii + 386 pp. £60. ISBN 1 58456 173 4 (USA); 0 7123 4926 x (UK).

Morris's doctor famously declared that his death was due to 'simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men' (Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for our Times (London, 1994), p. vii). In the 110 years separating his death and the publication of this bibliography, the foundations of the record of Morris's endeavours as a maker of books (as, variously, author, illustrator, and printer) were initially laid by 'Temple Scott' [i.e. I. H. Isaacs's] A Bibliography of the Works of William Morris (London, 1897), Harry Buxton Forman's The Books of William Morris Described with Some Account of his Doings in Literature and the Allied Crafts (London, 1897), and Sydney Cockerell's 'A Short Description of the Kelmscott Press' and 'An Annotated List of All the Books Printed at the Kelmscott Press in the Order in which they were Issued' in A Note by William Morris on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1898) in the nineteenth century, and enlarged and continued into the twentieth and the present centuries by William Morris and the Art of the Book, ed. by Paul Needham (New York, 1976), William S. Peterson's A Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1985), and Robert L. M. Coupe's Illustrated Editions of William Morris in English: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Castle, DE, 2002), amongst others. However, despite these important and useful works that consider aspects of Morris as a maker of books, there has been no modern, comprehensive bibliography of Morris's writings since the nineteenth century; those that we have from 1897 have been overtaken by subsequent scholarship, and, in the case of Forman, undermined by the author's covert desire to endow his 'creative forgeries' of Morris first editions with unwarranted credibility and value by including them in the canon of authentic works.

LeMire's purpose is to 'supplement and correct the Morris canon as inherited, to bring it into accord with what scholarship and the publishing industry have made of it both before and since 1897' (p. xxvii), with regard to the needs of critics, editors, bibliographers, collectors, and the general reader. The prodigious and varied nature of Morris's writings and the forms in which they appeared both before and after his death make his bibliographer's task an unusually difficult one, exacerbated by 'a bibliographical thicket of changing or exchanged titles, ambiguous or doubtful attributions, and uncertain or demonstrably incorrect dates of issue' (p. xxvii). LeMire has organized his Bibliography in five sections: A, comprising the original editions with posthumous editions to 1915, the date of issue of the final volume of [End Page 427] The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. by May Morris, 24 vols (London, 1910–15), together with first editions to the present; B, containing contributions written by Morris specifically for the books in which they appear; C, 'Collections and Selections', listing 'anthologies of Morris materials from 1856 to 1915 intended to be representative of the Morris oeuvre and collections built around particular interests, such as prose or poetry' (p. li), with collections of fugitive pieces to the present; D, giving periodical appearances to the present, when such publications were the first appearance of a work in the canon; and E, 'Forgeries, Piracies and Sophistications', separating out Messrs Wise and Forman's spurious additions to the corpus of Morris editions.

Any attempt to establish parameters for inclusion for such a sprawling body of work as Morris's will test the bibliographer's mettle and is most likely to throw up inconsistencies within any given system; LeMire's criteria are well thought out and clearly explained in his introduction and such exceptions as arise are noted and justified, with brief statements of delimitation prefacing each section (publications of private letters are not included, but editions of letters intended for publication are). The introduction is particularly enjoyable for the account...

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