William Morris and the Kelmscott Press

Bill Peterson's monograph on The Kelmscott Press is an amazing work of synthetic scholarship. It's unlikely to ever be equalled or surpassed. The entire book is available in an accurate online facsimile edition on Googlebooks. Click on the thumbnail view if you want to browse the images instead of read the text. 

Even though William Morris gets undeserved credit for starting the Private Press Movement (he was more of a popularizer than a creator), his work is impossible to ignore. Morris truly did bring together so many of the strands that have come to be known as the discipline we clumsily call "book history". But Morris did not work in a vacuum; he had many collaborators. Peterson's book makes these relationships clear. The most condensed statement of Morris's views on printing and book culture can be found in his 1893 essay "The Ideal Book".