Emery Walker and the Arts and Crafts movement

Walker was born in 1851 in London and trained as a process engraver. By the 1880s he was a central figure in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and a close friend of William Morris, whose house Kelmscott Manor he visited regularly. In 1888 Walker delivered a lecture at the New Gallery on typography and type design, illustrated by lantern slides of enlarged letterforms. Morris attended; the two men walked home together along the Hammersmith towpath and Morris began planning what became the Kelmscott Press that night.

Walker did not found Kelmscott Press, but he guided almost every typographic decision Morris made there. The Golden Type — drawn in 1890 to revive Nicolas Jenson’s 15th-century roman — was designed with Walker’s expertise in enlarging historical typefaces photographically. The Troy Type and the Chaucer Type followed. When Morris died in 1896, Walker continued to apply the same principles of historical type study, co-founding the Doves Press in 1900 with Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson. The Doves Type, a clean roman cut expressly for the press, became one of the most admired typefaces of the Edwardian era.

Walker was knighted in 1930 for his services to printing and the arts. He died at 7 Hammersmith Terrace in 1933, aged eighty-one, surrounded by the objects his friends and collaborators had given him over five decades.