Original Copies

My last post featured our copy of the Kelmscott Press edition of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. At that time I also looked at another book in the Iowa collection from the famous fine press of William Morris, but it's taken a bit of time, and a bit of digging, to explain its significance. The book's contents are near and dear to me -- and more importantly, central to my work on the early modern book trade -- Shakespeare's poems. Here's the title-page of Morris's 1893 Kelmscott edition of The Poems of William Shakespeare (catalog record here):

William Morris Was Here; or, Thinking Pink

The fine press collection here at Iowa is the real strength of the Special Collections library -- a strength that, mostly, I've willfully and woefully ignored while I've been here. I see it as my job (along with my trusty summer-fellowship endowed student sidekick, Rachel) to comb through the STC collection to see what we've got in the lesser-known early modern part of the collection. And recently we made an unwitting discovery inside an inglorious book. Rachel pulled a book in which, she found, the back board of the binding had snapped completely off -- it was entirely detached on the shelf: