By Miah Clark, Rare Books & Instruction Librarian,
The University of Arkansas Special Collections
The phrases “fine press” and “book arts” don’t always give students something to hold on to, but luckily as primary source educators, we can! When teaching with fine press material, I’ve found success in highlighting not subject material, but the physical material: the highs and lows of book quality throughout history that gave purpose to the presses of the late 19th and early 20th century. By highlighting the material contrast between a medieval Book of Hours, an American dime novel, and a Kelmscott Press edition, I can fix fine press books within a broader timeline of book production and popular aesthetics. By inviting students to engage with both the context and tactile nature of fine press, they better grasp not only what these books are, but why they were made, and why we continue to collect them.
of Arkansas.
When introducing the fine press movement, I use material from our Special Collections to move students through a brief but tactile timeline of the history of the book, starting with the medieval manuscript. Using a humble French Book of Hours and a much more grandiose “Bedford Hours” facsimile, students can see firsthand the labor-intensive artistry and careful construction of such books and can feel the strength and sturdiness of materials like parchment and vellum. Heavily illuminated manuscripts, which are already reliable as some of the most stimulating, help to ground these early codices as deeply aesthetic objects, but also as objects that required the labor of multiple people, of scribes and artists who were rarely credited. The relative cost of such labor and materials opens conversations about the preciousness of the medieval book, and the high stakes and intentionality of design choices knowing that necessary materials, if not already sparse, were expensive. The high cost of something like a Book of Hours is a barrier to access for most common people, who would not likely own a volume, or at least benefit from an heirloom copy.
Left: Book of Hours: Use of Paris. Paris, France: 1416. Special Collections,
University of Arkansas.
Right: Das Bedford Stundenbuch = The Bedford Hours. Faksimile Verlag Luzern,
Special Collections, University of Arkansas.
With the popularization of print in 15th-century Europe, incunabula, the earliest books printed with metal type, serve as a great example of early books that retain some of the same aesthetic excellence as medieval manuscripts but begin to standardize form and utilize more accessible materials, like paper made from raw plant fiber rags, including hemp, flax, or cotton. (Examples from our collection I love to use include a 1481 Liber sententiarum and a 1520 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.) The presence of woodcut illustrations and specialty typefaces show the steadfast dedication to viewing books as objects of beauty with the transition to print and provide necessary parallels for stylistic choices seen in fine press books.
Moving forward into the Victorian era, where industrialization and an increasingly literate public helped transform the book into a mass-produced commodity, the emphasis on artistry in bookmaking was abandoned in the printers’ quest to publish high quantities of books at high speeds. Examples of the “penny-dreadful” and other popular, low-quality serial publications, like the dime novels popular in the United States, showcase the switch to cheap paper, crowded typesetting, and flavorless, utilitarian designs. Physically, these are materials, I most frequently warn students, of being “crunchy”, with their deteriorating wood-pulp paper being far more susceptible to flaking and other damages in the present than some of the oldest books in our collections.
William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End.
Left: Lombard, Peter. Liber Setentiarum. Anton Koberger, 1481. Special Collections,
University of Arkansas.
Right: Morris, William. The Well at the World’s End. Kelmscott Press, 1896. Special
Collections, University of Arkansas.
Through our tactile timeline, it is here that students begin to ponder the same questions of important fine press figures: how did books get to be so low quality, and how do we bring beautiful books back? This is where fine press and its purpose emerge, as a response to the industrialization’s impact on print culture, and with the goal to reinvoke the artistry and intentionality of early manuscript and print books. William Morris, founder of the Kelmscott Press, in an 1893 interview asked the question, “Why should not every book be a thing of beauty?”[1] The admiration for and inspiration from medieval bookcraft can be clearly seen in the works of notable presses such as the Kelmscott, Aragny and Doves Presses, who made use of detailed woodcut illuminations, high-quality rag paper, and bold, legible typefaces. Our Special Collections proudly stewards a Kelmscott Press edition of William Morris’s The Well Beyond the World’s End, published in 1896, a later work of the press that serves as a shining example of the revitalization of the art of the book. The fine press movement, in its visceral efforts to draw from the past to improve the present and future state of printing, sought also a balance between a book’s aesthetic value and intrinsic utility. These books were designed to be used, to be read, but also to allow for the very act of reading to be pastime if the physical form of a book could also be appreciated.
Collections, The University of Arkansas.
Fine press’s emphasis on both an increasing access and enjoyment of books, coupled with the natural interdisciplinarity of the movement, widens the already open door of possible teaching opportunities across classes who visit Special Collections. For less subject-based introductory courses like First Year Seminars, teaching with Fine Press offers a well-rounded introduction to the span of material one might find in Special Collections, and a range of research topics students can explore with our material, from medieval illiteracy to the industrial revolution. Using a tactile timeline as part of instruction also fulfills the Primary Source Literacy Guideline 4C, with students being able to “situate a primary source in context by applying knowledge about the time and culture in which it was created; the author or creator; its format, genre, publication history; or related materials in a collection.”[2] Other disciplines that have taken interest include English, Publishing and Graphic Design, Art and Art History, and other Humanities programs or courses that seek to explore the intersections between utility, design, and literacy.
Fine press books, from their conception, are books that are meant to be experienced. By putting a fine press book in conversation and immediate contrast with the books that predate it, students can both see and feel the material presence of these objects, as they are tied to their individual intellectual contents. By giving students the space to handle different types of books, they can begin to understand the purpose of the fine press movement in a more inviting and more impactful way. Physical handling also makes way for students to notice things they might not have otherwise considered, such as the physical effort required to produce a book, the precision (or sometimes, lack thereof) of ink on the page, or the material of that page itself.
By giving students the space to handle different types of books, they can begin to understand the purpose of the fine press movement in a more inviting and more impactful way.
Ultimately, I’ve seen the most success when teaching with fine press books by first unraveling the why behind the movement. Without having to require subject expertise or previous readings, a tactile timeline of manuscript and print material shows that the fine press movement was about more than just “beautiful books”; it was a reimagining of where beauty could be integrated into everyday life, books included. As Morris himself asked in “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization, “How shall we set about giving people without traditions of art eyes with which to see works of art?”[3] In primary source instruction, we can answer quite simply: we let them look, and we let them touch.
[1] William Morris, “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization,” in William Morris on Art and Socialism, ed. Norman Kelvin (New York: Dover Press, 1999), 67.
[2] “Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy | SAA-ACRL/RBMS Joint Task Force on Primary Source Literacy,” Archivists.org, 2026, https://www2.archivists.org/groups/saa-acrlrbms-joint-task-force-on-primary-source-literacy/guidelines-for-primary-source-lite-0.
[3] William Morris, “Art, Craft, and Life: A Chat with Mr. William Morris, Daily Chronicle, 9 October 1893,” interview by Tony Pinkney, in We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96, ed. Tony Pinkney (Spire Books, 2005), 78.
Bibliography
“Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy | SAA-ACRL/RBMS Joint Task Force on Primary Source Literacy,” Archivists.org, 2026, https://www2.archivists.org/groups/saa-acrlrbms-joint-task-force-on-primary-source-literacy/guidelines-for-primary-source-lite-0.
Morris, William. “Art, Craft, and Life: A Chat with Mr. William Morris, Daily Chronicle, 9 October 1893.” Interview by Tony Pinkney. In We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96, edited by Tony Pinkney, 78. Spire Books, 2005.
Morris, William. “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization.” In William Morris on Art and Socialism, edited by Norman Kelvin, 67. New York: Dover Press, 1999.
Miah Clark is the Rare Books and Instruction Librarian in Special Collections and the University of Arkansas. Their research interests include the fine press period and the works of William Morris, early print culture in the Pacific Islands, and primary source education through pedagogies of relationality and cultural care.