The Kelmscott Chaucer is the most memorable and beautiful edition of the complete works of the first great English poet. Next to The Gutenberg Bible, it is considered the outstanding typographic achievement of all time. There are 87 full-page illustrations by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and the borders, decorations and initials are drawn byWilliam Morris himself. Only 425 copies of this magnificent work were produced in 1896, and this beautiful monochrome facsimile, slightly smaller than the original, makes this glorious book available to all. A fascinating Introduction by Nicholas Barker places the book and its importance in context. The main text is followed by a black and white facsimile of ANoteby William Morris on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, together with a Short History of the Press by S C Cockerell.

This volume of essays was produced in conjunction with a full-size facsimile of the Huntington's Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The introductory essays and appendices, prepared by Woodward (Huntington Library) and Stevens (Graduate School, City University of New York), explain the significance and construction of the facsimile and summarize the conservation work done on the manuscript as the facsimile was in the making. Essays by fourteen internationally known British, American, and Japanese scholars discuss the physical construction of the Ellesmere manuscript, its decoration and illumination, its text and language, the ways in which the arrangement and presentation of the manuscript affect the meaning of the text, the order of tales in the manuscript, the relationship of this work to contemporary literary efforts and practices, and the provenance of the manuscript before its acquisition by Henry E. Huntington in 1917. As a reflection of the significance of this manuscript in an increasingly English-reading world, the volume concludes with a survey of Chaucer studies in Japan. There are fifty-seven illustrations in the book, supplemented by a separate color foldout that reproduces all of the famous Ellesmere illustrations of the pilgrim-storytellers.

Excerpt from Geoffrey Chaucer That is why Chaucer, who paid allegiance to the same ideals, could not have been any more fortunate. Even his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, with their wealth of observation, their humour, their sympathy, their truth, would not have been listened to very long in France, for they only retold stories and legends which tradition had made familiar. The novelty of Chaucer's handling of these topics was only to become apparent much later, in England as well as in France, at a time when the topics themselves had become obsolete, so that the historian of Chaucerian criticism in France must not hope to find traces of literary influence, but to see what notice has been taken of Chaucer there, when the bare knowledge of his name gives place to an appreciation of his works and to estimate the quality Of this appreciation. I hope to show that such marks of interest were not wanting in France, and that Frenchmen, once the name of Chaucer had fairly estab lished itself among them as that of a great writer, lost no time in finding things out about him, and even ran English critics very close in the recognition of his rare merits. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.