Card binding for ‘The Knightes Tale’

Talwin Morris

[1900]

Cloth binding

6½ x 4¼ inches

Printed on cheap card, this design exemplifies Talwin Morris’s dedication to raising aesthetic standards. The elegant symmetry, showing two singing songbird, conveys the sense of the text’s poetic song; the background, made up of ‘Glasgow roses’, also suggests the writer’s lyricism. Carefully calculated, the book transcends its context as a piece of semi-ephemera.

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Photograph and text by Simon Cooke

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