In the first talk, "Manuscripts: Images, Color, Spacing, Text," Florence Boos will use materials from the William Morris Archive to demonstrate the interrelated ways in which Morris engaged with his written texts: through marginal drawings, multiple drafts of his writings, calligraphy, printing, engraving, bookbinding, and interspersed poetry. She will emphasize several kinds of evidence of his artistic processes: a newly-acquired trove of several hundred Morris sketches for Morris and Co.; the evolution of his revision practices as shown in his manuscripts; his poetic interpolations within translated works; and the designs for poems printed at the Kelmscott Press. All of these practices demonstrate Morris’s ability to conceptualize near-simultaneously in both visual and verbal creative forms.
In “Preservation, Botanical Books & the Kelmscott Press,” Jennifer Rabedeau will assess the interrelation between visual and material manifestations of plant matter in the books produced by the Kelmscott Press. Drawing on Joshua Calhoun’s framework for an ecology of texts and materialist accounts of Morris’s works, she connects the plant matter that subtends the Kelmscott page with the floral ornamentation that decorates its margins. Simultaneously at full flower and stripped of their roots, the twining vegetal forms of Morris’s designs defy ordinary patterns of plant growth. Outside of time, they have neither an organic origin nor will they ever decay, unless the substance on which they are printed decays. Printed on rag paper made from linen—already untimely in the Victorian period—the Kelmscott page is itself processed, denaturalized plant matter. Grafting together these visual and material botanical logics, she argues that Kelmscott books enact a project of preservation that ultimately invites us to reconsider the mechanisms by which Morris’s works have been preserved for us as readers today—in archival spaces and beyond.
In "William Morris as a Hinge Figure for Way & Williams publishers (in 1895)," Craig J. Saper will explore why Morris chose to collaborate with a small press in Chicago to issue the only book published in the United States with his cooperation, and how we might appreciate the literary signalling in his production of Hand & Soul (London: Kelmscott Press, Chicago: Way and Williams, 1895). Of special interest is a marginal rubrication of a line in Rossetti’s text claiming that the designer and publisher have “done nothing” to add value to the original text. Yet this writer-centric critic ignores the important roles of designer and publisher in creating meaning, and Morris is a key example of a publisher who plays the role of what Liesl Olson calls a "hinge figure" in transmission. The hinge also serves as a figurative term for the expansion of writing and writers beyond merely literal signification, suggesting the creation of literary meaning through material culture.
In “Mock-Medieval Materiality: The Uncharted Influence of William Morris on Modern Fantasy,” Alexandra du Plessis will consider Morris's influence on modern fantasy from the novel perspective of the contributions of his material culture to the nascent mode. Described by Dimitra Fimi as one of the ‘grandfathers’ of modern fantasy, Morris's broad command of visual art forms, especially the design of interior ephemera such as fabrics, wallpaper, and furniture, was itself a project in worldbuilding that greatly influenced subsequent fantasts. The first half of the paper describes his earliest fascination with speculative forms and his relationship with the “forgotten” father of fantasy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the second half focuses on his influence on two Birmingham-based artist writers, Bernard Sleigh (1872-1954), whose own valorization of Morris’s work is well documented in his biography and his own Memoirs of a Human Peter Pan, in which he expressed a particular affection for Morris’s materiality; and J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), who in his letters positioned himself as an inheritor of Morris’s mode of storytelling. In both the work of Sleigh and Tolkien an especial love of craft transpired in their early work as a mock-medieval materiality that transforms into sophisticated and foundational fantasy in their later careers. Thus, Morris’s influence as the lynchpin in a significant artistic lineage is incontrovertibly established.