MY OPINION (without the aid of my books to correct me):

Morris was a part of the end of the pre-raphaelite movement obsessed with living their lives through rose-colored glasses. could this be attributed to his socialist tendencies as well? he idealized about the making of the book and yearned for years gone past. they were, in essence, kicking against the pricks of the industrial revolution.

In some ways, Morris and his peers repeated what had happened with the Humanists. They had found manuscripts which they assumed to be in the ideal style and adopted it. Perhaps it wasn’t just the type which Morris had a dislike for, but the entire era in general.

> Morris and his peers

Most with the support and efforts of Beatrice Warde, who did much of the initial research on true origin of Garamond types, and who also “Rejected the avant-garde in typography as introspective, believing that classical typography proved a ’clearly polished window’ through which ideas could be communicated.”

Oooops! My fault, I’m thinking Morison, not Morris.

Tiffany’s right - William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement were a backlash against the industrial revolution in England at that time (and remember he died in 1896, so perhaps was mainly active 1860 - 1880?) but certain of Morris’s arguments were being reiterated by Edward Johnston and Eric Gill still 50 years later.

I think Morris’s chief objections were against the gaudy chintz of the Victorian display faces (all those elephantine fat faces and mad inverted serifs), falling standards of press work, and an eventual bastardization (by way of Scotch Roman, perhaps) of the modern letterform - long debased from the clarity of Didot and Bodoni in the preceding century. In the 1880s the steam-driven press and new chemically-derived inks and papers were only about 40 years young; these inventions had a great (Morris would say detrimental) effect on the speed and finish of jobbing printing - almost the reverse of what consideration of ink and paper had accomplished for John Baskerville in the 1740s.

To answer your question, the humanist faces of Jenson and Aldus were superseded by the old style faces of Garamond and Granjon within a century of their creation; the new faces produced in the 17thC were more forgiving for the vagaries of the press work - uneven pressure, damp paper, sticky inks etc. Over the next two centuries the press work got better, machine tolerances, inks and paper all improved and as a result the typeforms became thinner and finer; but it was these very qualities that suffered so much in ’bash it out’ mentality of printing in the industrial revolution. Type often got damaged and loose in the bed of the press, wrong sorts were commonly substituted and the whole job subsequently badly impressed on poor quality stock. Morris’s arguments, I think, were as much about time, skill and care being exercised in any calling, not just printing.

For contemporary metal type based on the works of Italian renaissance typographers 1900-20, you could check out MF Benton’s Cloister Old Style (1897), Frederic Goudy’s Kennerley (1911) and Bruce Rogers Centaur (1914). These were influenced by the private press movement, of which the Kelmscott Press was just a part. You might also want to look at the work of the Doves Press (Doves Roman), the Cranach Press and the writings of Stanley Morison.

speaking of Cloister & Kennerly...

One interesting thing I would add is that a similar “uprising” took place in France some decades before Morris, against the Didone (Modern) type style which had conquered all and covered the typographic landscape with a frigid blanket (and made reading a pain in the eye sockets in the process).

hhp

Sebson

I’m not sure I can explain this as well as need be. Part of the problem re: Morris is that the idea of continuum that we enjoy today was simply not there in the late 19th century. Just prior to Morris starting his press, Kodak brought out film for photography. Morris was greatly influenced by Emery Walker’s investigation of Renaissance and medieval type forms that he captured with the camera, and that he found in library and personal collections (note that public access at that time was not like we enjoy). It may seem very strange today but this is extraordinarily significant. Without the camera there is no visual representation of the typeforms of previous periods. And, in the late 19th century, typography can be considered, at least in terms of composition, likely the worst imaginable. Anything from a previous period would have looked beautiful compared to it.

So, with Morris and his Arts & Crafts inclination, there is an investigation, and a revival. And there is an across the board initial revival based on his influence, which is sometimes called the false revival, and then there is the later 1920s revival institigated by Monotype, where the truer forms, Bembo, Centaur, Poliphilus, are brought to fore.

The first writer on printing, Joseph Moxon, had no clue, 200 years after the invention of printing, what the evolution of typeforms had been. It is easy enough for us to discern this but likely not for anyone prior to the visual representation provided by the photograph.

I’ve been amazed, that this idea of the photographic representation of letterforms, and its consequences upon the accepted notion of continuum, has never been discussed in any technical literature.

Gerald