THE POEMS OF JOHN KEATS

First edition, first printing. Original limp vellum binding lettered in gilt to the spine. Complete with the slightly frayed original golden silk ties. Printed in black and red and set in Morris' own Golden type. Each poem and section with its own elaborately decorated initial letter. An uncommonly crisp, bright, and well-preserved copy, the binding square and firm, the vellum, showing a few light marks and natural discolouration, remains unusually fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. A lovely copy.

One of 300 copies printed on paper (seven copies were printed on vellum), the rear colophon states that the edition was "Overseen after the text of foregoing editions by F. S. Ellis, and printed by me William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, Upper Mall, Middlesex, and finished on the 7th day of March, 1894." On 25 May 1893, Ellis wrote to the Keats scholar Harry Buxton Forman to report that "Morris is printing at the Kelmscott Press a small edition of certain Poems of Keats – all those which he considers worth printing & I am seeing it through the press for him. Would you mind telling me if any of Keats' Poems are at present copyright, as he would of course omit them. It will simply [be] a handsomely printed volume without notes of any kind." In his bibliography of Kelmscott Press, William S. Peterson notes that "[a]s an undergraduate Morris owned the 1854 edition of Keats's Poetical Works, and his own poetry, as he admitted, shows indebtedness to Keats." The handsome edition he produced includes the Odes, as well as 'Lamia', 'Isabella', 'Eve of St. Agnes', 'Hyperion', and opens with the complete 'Endymion' (pp. 1-142), whose opening lines ("A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness [...]"), elaborately framed and decorated face and mirror the similarly intricate title page, might stand as something like a credo for Morris and his Press (obliquely recalling his injunction to "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful"). The Kelmscott Press, which he modestly described as no more than "a little typographical adventure", represented Morris' personal crusade to create beautifully designed and printed books against the grain of the increasingly cheap and disposable products of the Victorian publishing industry. The Keats volume, Peterson notes, was "popular and went out of print very quickly." Published on 8 May 1894 and priced at 30s. (the vellum copies were sold for 9 guineas), it was, as the colophon states "Sold by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press". (Peterson A24)