The Nature of Gothic. A Chapter of the Stones of Venice.

Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892. One of 500 copies printed on paper, there were no vellum copies. 20 architectural line-block figures in text. Border on the first page of the text, 111 six- and, mainly, ten-line initial letters, all by William Morris, engraved on wood by W.H. Hooper et al, the initial letters then being electroplated. Press device printed in two places at the end of the table of contents and on the colophon. Printed in black and red Golden type on hand-made Batchelor Flower paper, with decorated initials, numbers, titles and side notes printed in red throughout. Sm. 4to., original stiff vellum with brown silk ties, yapp edges, spine lettered in gilt, fore- and lower edges untrimmed. A very good tight copy without the usual bowing and with all the ties, vellum with some marks and a little darkening to the edges.||The chapter from his Stones of Venice which Ruskin always believed to be the most important and which was first printed separately in 1854 as a sixpenny pamphlet. Morris held it in high regard. Ruskin felt the same way about Morris, saying of him, “Morris is beaten gold”.|Petersen, Bibliography of the Kelmscott Press, A4; S.C. Cockerell in his Annotated List of the Books from the Press in ‘A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press’ [A53], 1898, p. 23-4 A very good tight copy