Morris Blog Book Available

If William Morris were alive today, he would certainly be busily blogging on all the literary, cultural and political issues that so passionately absorbed him; and in fact his ‘Notes on News’ items in his socialist newspaper Commonweal in the late 1880s do constitute a kind of political blog in their own right. But since we don’t actually have Morris’s own blog, we shall have to make do with blogs about him and his work.

There are by now several of these, but the blog you are currently reading, ‘William Morris Unbound’, was the world’s first blog on Morris-and-utopia. Now, with the publication of William Morris: The Blog from the Kelmsgarth Press, I have brought the 139 posts between its launch in October 2007 and the end of March 2011 from the blogosphere into print. These brief entries, which I hope illuminate and entertain by turns, explore the full range of Morris’s concerns: poetry and printing, Icelandic sagas and romance writing, art and architecture, utopia and socialism. But they also range into such unlikely topics as drawing pins, insults, Star Trek, Southend Pier and penis size, as well as offering a Morrisian commentary on national and international events of recent years.

At the very heart of my ‘blog book’ is Morris’s great utopia, News from Nowhere, and William Morris: The Blog offers many new approaches to that work, as well as the prospect of a twenty-first-century sequel to it. To purchase the book at £12.95 paperback (includes postage), please go to the Kelmsgarth Press website at http://kelmsgarthpress.com/ and use the Paypal facility there.