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Each year during the annual Modern Language Association Convention, the William Morris Society sponsors one or two sessions of papers and also takes a field trip to a local arts and crafts site. This year I organized a special session on Pre-Raphaelites in the Pierpont Morgan Library, so we visited the Morgan for a private exhibition on January 5, 2018. It was held in the decidedly swanky North Parlor and featured objects mentioned in the papers given by Meghan Freeman, Heather Bozant-Witcher, and myself. This photograph shows three long-time members of the Morris Society in attendance: Mark Samuels Lasner, Florence Boos, and Frank Sharp. Behind Mr. Samuels Lasner is an early sketch (1860) made by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of William Morris’s wife Jane. The sketch had been owned by musical theater composer Jerome Kern and was acquired by the Morgan in 1961. It is virtually unknown, since it was not mentioned in the 1971 complete catalogue of Rossetti’s works compiled by Virginia Surtees

The Minute Book of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., held at the Huntington Library in California, is a palm-sized volume with handsome marbled covers. Ford Madox Brown, the Pre-Raphaelite painter who served as the Firm’s unofficial secretary and chair, presumably picked it up at a stationer’s shop sometime near the end of 1862, shortly before writing on its flyleaf, “Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Minute book commencing Dec 10 1862.” On the page opposite he wrote the Firm’s address in Bloomsbury: “8 Red Lion Sq.” Brown bought a book with blank pages; if he had been thinking ahead, he might have purchased something larger, more suitable for accounting. Within weeks, when he wrote up a lengthy balance sheet, he had to spread the figures over several of the small, unlined pages. Yet the volume’s impractical elegance seems appropriate. Looking through the entire Minute Book, as I did on a recent research trip to the Huntington, is less like examining an account book than like