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.