Frustrated by the poor quality of Victorian mass-produced paperbacks, Morris established his own private press, the Kelmscott Press, in 1891 to produce handmade books. The first book to be printed was the Golden Legend, a medieval guide to Christian saints. Morris designed a new typeface for the text resembling a font he found in a fifteenth-century hand-printed book. He took inspiration from the original font claiming ‘I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it’. William Morris’s original drawing for this frontispiece is also in the Gallery’s collection, see: D239.
