Four years in the making, it includes 87 illustrations by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones – who devoted all his Sundays for almost three years to the work – with the process of adapting the drawings to the woodblock entrusted to WH Hooper and R Patterson-Smith.
A total of 425 copies were printed on paper in cloth-backed blue boards and originally priced at £20 with an additional medievalstyle pigskin binding executed by the Doves Bindery or the firm of JJ Leighton, available for a further £13. A total of 48 copies were bound in this way.
Copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer printed on vellum were priced at £126 in the standard binding. Just 13 were made and they have long ranked among the great treasures of antiquarian book collecting.
The example by the work’s editor, FS Ellis sold for £510 to Quaritch in 1901. The last to appear at auction, in 1997 at Christie’s New York, was once owned by Morris’ private secretary Sydney Cockerell and contained his notes on the production of the book. Sold in 1938 for £960 and again in 1956 for £2300, it took $550,000 in 1997. It might bring over $1m today.
A standard copy printed on paper is a more affordable proposition. The Chaucer accompanied by an autograph letter signed from Morris to the Birmingham school artistjeweller Arthur Joseph Gaskin (1862-1928), is priced at £60,000 by Shapero Rare Books.
