News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest was serialized in Commonweal (the journal of the Socialist League) in 1890 and published as a book by Reeves & Turner in 1891. A man falls asleep in Victorian London and wakes in a future England — roughly the year 2102 — where the revolution has succeeded. Capitalism, money, government, prisons, and compulsory labor have all been abolished. People work because work is pleasurable; they create beautiful things because beauty is a human need; they live in small communities connected by clean rivers and surrounded by gardens.
Morris wrote the book partly in response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), an American socialist utopia that Morris found repellent — Bellamy’s future was centralized, mechanized, and bureaucratic. Morris’s future is decentralized, handcrafted, and medieval in character: the people of Nowhere dress in fourteenth-century clothing, live in Gothic buildings, and practice crafts rather than operating machines.
The 1892 Kelmscott Press edition — printed on handmade paper in Morris’s own Golden Type with a woodcut frontispiece by C.M. Gere showing the medieval manor of Kelmscott — is one of the most beautiful books ever produced and among the most valuable products of the private press movement.
Collecting News from Nowhere
First book edition (Reeves & Turner, London, 1891): Blue cloth.
Kelmscott Press edition (1892): Vellum-backed boards, handmade paper.
Market values:
- Kelmscott Press edition, fine: $8,000–$25,000
- Reeves & Turner first, fine: $500–$1,500
- Reeves & Turner first, very good: $200–$500