Editing Private press (section)

====United Kingdom====
The term "private press" is often used to refer to a movement in book production which flourished around the [[Turn of the century|turn]] of the 20th century under the influence of the scholar-artisans [[William Morris]], Sir [[Emery Walker]] and their followers. The movement is often considered to have begun with the founding of Morris' [[Kelmscott Press]] in 1890, following a lecture on printing given by Walker at the [[Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society]] in November 1888. Morris decried that the [[Industrial Revolution]] had ruined man's joy in work and that mechanization, to the extent that it has replaced handicraft, had brought ugliness with it. Those involved in the private press movement created books by traditional printing and binding methods, with an emphasis on the book as a work of art and manual skill, as well as a medium for the transmission of information. Morris was greatly influenced by medieval codices and early printed books and the 'Kelmscott style' had a great, and not always positive, influence on later private presses and commercial book-design. The movement was an offshoot of the [[Arts and Crafts movement]], and represented a rejection of the cheap mechanised book-production methods which developed in the Victorian era. The books were made with high-quality materials (handmade paper, traditional inks and, in some cases, specially designed typefaces), and were often bound by hand. Careful consideration was given to format, page design, type, illustration and binding, to produce a unified whole. The movement dwindled during the worldwide depression of the 1930s, as the market for luxury goods evaporated. Since the 1950s, there has been a resurgence of interest, especially among artists, in the experimental use of [[letterpress printing]], paper-making and hand-bookbinding in producing small editions of 'artists' books', and among amateur (and a few professional) enthusiasts for traditional printing methods and for the production 'values' of the private press movement.<ref name="Yale-Library-Gazette 1991 Apr" /><ref name="Horowitz 2006 Fall" /><ref name="Guardian 1970 Jun 25" />