A Short and Beautiful Life: The Books, Writers and Artists who made the Shakespeare Head Press

Few have heard of the Shakespeare Head Press, although it ranks alongside William Morris’s Kelmscott , Emery Walker and Cobden—Sanderson’s Doves, Eric Gill’s Golden Cockerel and St John Hornby’s Ashendene. Its origins date to the 1860s, when a young Arthur Henry Bullen, dreamt of printing the whole of Shakespeare. Making his dream a reality, Bullen founded his the press in 1904 in an old Tudor house, where Shakespeare would have been a guest.

There are many backstories associated with the S...