A House of Air. Hermione Lee

seem to be in a kind of partnership, interpreting together Morris’s genius and his shortcomings.

      The influence of the ‘typographical experiment’ was powerful in northern Europe and the United States until the turn of the century, but is difficult to assess today. Reluctantly Mr Peterson concludes that the gap between the private printer and ‘the automated realm of offset presses and computerized typesetting’ has come to define two separate worlds. But he still believes that ‘the profound questions that Morris posed about the triumph of the machine’ are relevant to everyone in a technological society. Can we recover not only simpler and slower methods and infinitely higher quality, but a joy and freedom in work which, perhaps, once existed? Can we rebuild the foundations?