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Sunday, September 11, 2016

Kelmscott CHAUCER: World's Most Beautiful Book?

Yesterday, I posted about the world’s most expensive books.  In the top-ten list is the 1477 first edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.  Printed by William Caxton, it was the first major volume printed in England (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10475282/The-worlds-most-expensive-books.html?frame=2746579).

It is the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer published by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press in 1896 which the Irish poet William Butler Yeats called the “most beautiful of all printed books.”  Apparently, Morris, a major figure in the arts and crafts movement, spent four years designing what he believed to be the ideal book.  This edition made the news recently when it was announced that the University of British Columbia Library purchased a copy for $202,000 (US).

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