In 1900, as Oscar Wilde lay on his deathbed in Paris, a new style of publishing was emerging in Britain. The Arts and Crafts Movement, which was already well established in other art forms, was spreading into the literary world.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was a reaction against the meteoric rise of machine-led mass production. Its proponents celebrated traditional artisanry and unaided human skill. In publishing, the urge for the handmade crystallised around private presses: tiny publishing houses set up by just one or a few individuals, employing only the highest quality hand methods to print limited runs of texts. Private printers would treat texts with enormous care, taking great pleasure in sourcing the finest fonts, artwork and bindings to complement an author’s work. Though such presses reached their heyday in the early 1900s, their appeal has lasted and some still exist today.
Our exhibition explores private-press printing though the lens of the Old Library’s Oscar Wilde collection. Wilde’s inimitable works, charismatic personality, and tragic life story have inspired many an artisan printer to take to their press.