John Ruskin

John Ruskin is on this shelf because he was on the first one. When It’s Nice That wrote about Karolis Kosas’s Anonymous Press on 7 February 2013, it described the service as a way to “churn out fanzines on John Ruskin, inter-dimensional travel or whatever else your niche interests require”. The title is borrowed from that sentence. Two facts make it more than a joke for a press.

The critic who published himself

In 1871 Ruskin decided to set up a publishing house of his own. It was run by George Allen, who had been his drawing pupil at the Working Men’s College and later engraved plates for his books. Allen started it “at a week’s notice, and without any previous experience of the trade”, first from his cottage at Keston, later from an outhouse in the garden of his villa at Orpington. He opened a London office at 8 Bell Yard, Chancery Lane, in 1890, and the firm became George Allen and Unwin after Stanley Unwin took it over in 1913. The account comes from the Dictionary of National Biography (1912), as summarised in Allen’s Wikipedia entry.

An author who controls how his own books reach readers: that is the ambition the short history of the small run on this site follows, from the photocopier to print on demand.

The Nature of Gothic, printed by Morris

“The Nature of Gothic” is a chapter of the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853). Its subject is the worker more than the building: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.”

In 1892 William Morris printed the chapter as a book of its own at the Kelmscott Press in Hammersmith, published by George Allen in London and Orpington. His preface, signed 15 February 1892, says the chapter “in future days will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century”. The colophon of that edition, and the preface, can be read in a scan on the Internet Archive.

What the engine made of him

The cover on this page is what that sentence warns against: a machine working with the accuracy of a tool, precise and perfect in all its actions. Type his name into the generator and the same stacked bars come back in the same green and orange, every time, with no hand in them. The press keeps the title because it is the clearest argument against the press.

Sources

• James Cartwright, “Anonymous Press (opens in new tab)”, It’s Nice That, 7 February 2013.
• “George Allen (publisher) (opens in new tab)”, Wikipedia, after Sidney Lee (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography, second supplement, 1912.
• John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic: a chapter of The Stones of Venice (opens in new tab), Kelmscott Press, 1892, with a preface by William Morris (scan on the Internet Archive).
• “The Stones of Venice (book) (opens in new tab)”, Wikipedia, for the dates of the three volumes (1851 and 1853).