It may be said of human affairs, as well as of physical objects, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The manufacture of books in mass quantities for ordinary readers set off not only a literary reaction against philistine taste but also a printers’ and consumers’ revolt against mass-market books of low price and equally low aesthetic quality. The chief perpetuator of quality design in books was and remains to this day the private press movement, which can be traced at least as far back as Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill experiments of the late eighteenth century. The most famous proponent of ‘fine printing’, however, is undoubtedly William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press may be re garded either as typical of the folly of the 1890s handicraft fad or as the progenitor of the private press movement that remained popular until after World War II.

In ways that are difficult to appreciate now, the private press movement transcended the interests of wealthy aesthetes and pretentious bohemians and became quite a popular one. Hugh Kenner comments on it rather sarcastically in the following passage: