/lit/ - Literature

William Morris alone justifies the Victorian era.

>>14929985
I've just finished it and it's lovely.

>>14011031
Leading authority, no. But once you've done your doctorate on something and published a few articles, you certainly know more about that than the average bear. Unfortunately, nobody cares aside from a few fellow scholars.

>>13759287
It's me (unless there's another adjunct who did his doctorate on Morris hanging around here, in which case I should meet him). Howdy.

>>13618876
You don't want actual Marxists, you want William Morris, greatest of the Victorian English Socialists, and lover of beauty and equality.

>>13446133
I suppose I might be. Is that uncommon here? I do like Morris, though.

>>12059566
40s, actually. And yes, I'm a literature professor (far from retirement), so the books accumulate like snow. I have a lot of "fun" books as well, but since I teach fantasy, horror, SF, mystery, comics, and other genre courses, the lines are very blurred.

>>11263593
Well, that was a timely missing word. Very embarrassing.
>>11263576
The Victorian/Pre-Raphaelite private press revival and its relationship to medieval manuscripts, roughly.

>>10690528
But please, don't dissect old books! I buy or take pages from irreparably damaged gatherings or parts of volumes only, not books that are intact or could be re-bound.

>>9740418
Heh. No, I have my own house, family, doctorate, and teach as an adjunct. My thesis was on Morris: pic related.

>>8521086
A bit more than that, but yes, I think you mean me. When an interviewer in 1895 started giving Morris the usual hard time--"How can you be a socialist when you're making these beautiful small-press-run books that only rich folks can own?"--he basically said "No, dude. I want all books to be beautiful, and held in trust. Nice libraries in every town should have them and people come, sit down in comfy armchairs after work, and read in peace. The books stay where everyone can enjoy and share them. People can own their own books, of course, but libraries are there so valuable and rare books can be shared." He and his artist friends spent so much time in the British Museum library looking over works like the15th-century French manuscript of the Roman de la rose that he thought it would be obvious to folks that you didn't need a Kelmscott Chaucer in every house, you just needed one in every library.

1. Because if your desired reading list only contains books available in torrents, that's sad. There is endless material not in that format yet.
2. Because e-readers are useless for any book with large-format, illustrations, interesting typography, etc. You're stuck with an impoverished tiny screen, and often horribly garbled formatting.
3. Because I want to read books at my leisure, come back to them without warning months or years later, and have them nearby.
4. Because I might want to loan one to a friend.
5. Because I use them for research, study, and teaching, and don't want to worry about their availability or when they're due.
6. Because if we don't buy books, publishers continue to go out of business, and there won't be any new books.
7. Because books are fabulous, fascinating, beautiful things, and I enjoy them aesthetically as well as for their content.

None of this is to say that e-readers and libraries aren't fantastically useful, but they certainly don't cover all needs.

>>8246385
I had grabbed it out to check a quote for an article/book chapter on Morris I was writing, and realized some of the pages were still uncut (I used a digital version when getting quotes for rough draft, but I don't trust other people's quotes or transcriptions for final draft, so I checked the real 1924 source), and separated it so I could get a paper knife and cut them carefully. Generally only my more fragile or rare Morris books were in that case: most of them were in this case.

Buy the books, enjoy them, don't spend more than you can afford. It beats the hell out of cigs, drugs, booze, etc. Everyone wastes their cash, and most folks don't get a library out of it like we do.

The greatest application of socialist sensibilities, evolved from Carlyle, Ruskin, and (oddly) Schiller, was William Morris's pairing of human artistic dignity with true equality. Morris doesn't get a fraction of the attention he deserves, sadly: WWI and Modernism finalized the rejection of all things Victorian a century ago. But he was an immensely thoughtful man, and too smart to let his radicalism be simple-minded.