The Publishing Activities of Way & Williams, Chicago, 1895-98

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

“…Way and Williams toured England in 1895, and during this visited William Morris's studio and the Kelmscott Press. 6 Both politically and aesthetically, William Morris resisted the commercial publishing model of inexpensive, mass-produced and pirated books that dominated the major New York publishers of the time, such as Harper & Brothers or Scribners. Harper & Brothers, for example, had built its wealth and dominance on publishing English authors, such as Charles Dickens and the Brontës, without having to legally pay any royalties to them.…”

“…22 In this historical context, it is not surprising that both Way and Williams were founding members of The Caxton Club, a literary salon specifically for publishers and potential patrons of the literary culture of the 1890s. 23 Caxton is most famous for the first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1476), an early example of publishing in English, and a work written in a living language rather than in the Latin of officialdom. The name of the Caxton Club made direct reference to the publisher's art as an alternative to the mainstream official culture of the time: an art that had moved from the centre of cultural exchange, with publishers as celebrities, up until the 1840s, to the outer edge of cultural experimentation.…”