The Century Guild Hobby Horse

These notes were written over twenty years ago when I was endeavouring to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mackmurdo with a small exhibition at Forty Hall Museum, Enfield, & now urgently need revision. I place them in this blog for their, however remote, connection to the reception of William Blake.

In April 1884 the first issue of the Century Guild Hobby Horse was published: an elaborately designed & finely printed magazine. It was to run till 1892, changing to a larger format in 1886. In its freshness of approach to typography, its use of original illustrative material, & in the combination of stories, drawings by new artists, advanced poetry, & essays on music & other cultural aspects catching the fancy of the editors, it was the first of a succession of artistic & literary magazines which were to be the most striking manifestation of the English decadent school in the 1890s.

Mackmurdo found in the Chiswick Press a printing press of unusually high standard, in Emery Walker a man to whom the reproduction of drawings & other works of graphic art could be safely entrusted, & the ideal book-decorators in Selwyn Image & Herbert Horne. By printing the Hobby Horse on hand-made paper, by carefully choosing a good traditional type, & by conscientiously setting & spacing the type, a production was achieved far above anything available at the time. The cover used a design by Selwyn Image in which the wealth of ornithological & animal motifs set the style for much later English Art Nouveau design. From 1886 onwards Mackmurdo & his colleagues published articles by contributors including Ruskin, Burne-Jones, William & Christina Rossetti & Oscar Wilde.



The magazine was intended by Mackmurdo to publicise Ruskinian ideals of design & production & its early editions are studded with articles by a carefully chosen cast of nineteenth-century progressives: Ford Madox Brown, the Rossettis, May Morris (William's embroiderer daughter), Matthew Arnold, G.F. Watts & Oscar Wilde.

In the Hobby Horse, from the very first number in 1884, we find certain features that were to prove of fundamental significance to book illustration & the graphic arts in the 1880s & 1890s. Not only the page but the entire layout was treated as an artistic entity. The illustration was not merely a dependent narrative element, but an integral part of the whole. The two-dimensional effect of the woodcut, concise & artistic, was also fully developed with special emphasis on the innate value of line. A particularly important point is that the Hobby Horse abandoned the illusionistic three-dimensional art of illustration. The Hobby Horse was the first periodical which expressly tackled the task of renewing typography & book illustration.



Although just over a hundred pages in length, the first issue of the Hobby Horse does not contain a great deal of material because of the large typeface, the wide margins & the prodigal but admirable use of space in the layout of the poems featured.  Here is an entirely new style of magazine, in format & general presentation; even today the appearance, the feel, the whole style of the issue seems remarkable.

A notable feature of the magazine was its embellishment with small wood block cuts which make it one of the most handsomely produced of all periodicals. Volume II contained new initial letters & tail-pieces, designed by Selwyn Image, & cut by C.M. Padday. The acknowledgement is important, because part of the message of the periodical is that art should be seen as a unified process, & that the craftsman is an integral part of the process of creating some art forms.

In its final shape, the magazine was called simply The Hobby Horse. It had a re-designed front cover by Herbert Horne, who also edited it. Numbers 1 & 2 appeared in 1893, & number 3 (the last) in 1894. Mackmurdo having withdrawn his financial support (which had allowed the old series to appear at the subsidised price of 2s 6d per quarterly copy), the annual subscription was to be £1 (for 2 numbers only).

The Century Guild Hobby Horse was the first magazine to become self-conscious, & to see itself as a work of art. So the design of the typeface itself, & its distribution on the page, the size of the margins, the relationship of illustration to typeface, the texture of the paper on which all this appeared - all of these became matters of the first importance, with the result that the magazine not only aspired to present art in all its forms, but became a work of art in its own right.

Finally, perhaps it should be emphasised that it achieved all its influence & success from a very tiny base. Its circulation, according to Mackmurdo himself, never quite reached five hundred copies, & this ultimately declined to little more than a hundred.