‘Hand & Soul’: The Fin de Siècle Sociopoetics of Way & Williams and the Auvergne Press

Abstract

The sociopoetics of books extends reading beyond interpreting the ephemeral voices of writers to include reading books as an intermedia expression of the entire publishing package: design, printing, production processes, distribution and other issues usually seen as ancillary to literary value. Sociopoetics begins with contributing to the literary and cultural history of important publishing teams and presses. It then builds on that research to study the goals and outputs of specific presses' modern aesthetic sensibilities in relation to the impact of, resistance to and use of corporate networks and media technologies. 1 The co-publication, with William Morris's Kelmscott Press, of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Hand & Soul (1895) by the fin de siècle US press Way & Williams 2 raises a number of key sociopoetic issues: how Way & Williams related to international, especially Anglo-American, networks and influences; the way it related to