THE WORKS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER. From the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales and Professor W. Walter Skeat's editions of the other works [edited by F.S. Ellis, printed on the colophon leaf]

Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. One of 425 copies of a total edition of 438. With 87 wood-engravings designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, cut by W.H. Hooper after drawings by Robert Catterson-Smith, superb wood-engraved title page, fourteen very fine large borders, eighteen different woodcut frames around the illustrations, twenty-six nineteen line woodcut initial letters, and numerous initials, decorative woodcut printer’s device all designed by William Morris and cut by C.E. Keates, Hooper and W. Spelmeyer, with shoulder and side titles. Printed in red and black in Chaucer type, double column, headings to the longer poems in Troy type. Folio (425 x 289 mm), printer's original Holand linen-backed blue paper boards, original paper label on the spine lettered in black. iv, 554 pp. An especially fine and handsome copy, the text is pristine, crisp, fresh and bright, the binding in full original state and in excellent condition, the linen on these bindings is typically heavily mellowed but this copy is virtually free of that mellowing, the original blue paper covered boards with just a little rubbing or wear at the corners only, a splendid copy indeed. A VERY FINE AND HANDSOME COPY OF WHAT IS CONSIDERED TO BE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PRINTED BOOK IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. The Kelmscott Chaucer is "the most famous book of the modern private press movement, and the culmination of William Morris's endeavor" (The Artist and the Book). "[F]rom first appearance, the Chaucer gained a name as the finest book since Gutenberg. It has held its place near the head of the polls ever since... The terms which critics used in the eighteen-nineties to welcome it simply show us what an impression Morris's printing made upon late Victorian bookmen" (Colin Franklin, The Private Presses, p. 43). Evidence of the esteem in which the book has been held lies in the fact that after the Second World War, during the rebuilding of Japan and its libraries, a copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer was the first book presented to the Japanese people by the British Government on behalf of the English nation.
The Kelmscott Press produced forty-eight books in its brief life. Morris had toyed with the idea of a Shakespeare in three folio volumes; a suggestion for a King James version of the Bible was in his pending file; and preliminary work had begun on editions of Froissart and Malory, both of which would have formed a triumvirate with the Chaucer. But on October 3, 1896, Morris died, and for all intents and purposes the Kelmscott Press died with him, the Froissart and Malory unfinished. The Chaucer, regretfully, remained the only "titan" among Kelmscott books.
Morris dedicated his life to poetry and the decorative arts, but he did not exhibit an active interest in the design and production of books until he was fifty-five years old. He died eight years later, but in that brief fragment of time he established a standard and prestige that still make him one of the most powerful and pervasive influences in book design in the English-speaking, English-reading world.