Author: Petter Eklund

”Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown:In the trees the wind westering moved;Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,And in the dark house was I loved.”This is the final stanza in William Morris’s poem Thunder In The Garden, from his book Poems By The Way, published in 1891 as some kind of scrap book with older texts, new poems written on the way to somewhere, for newspapers and directly for his political mission.”Thunder”, is one of the new ones, maybe written just…

It was a Thursday, we had just come off the Eurostar from Bruxelles for six days in London, and we seized the moment: ”Kelmscott is open today, wo-hoooo”. Straight off on the bus to Hammersmith.We found a very cool Brutalist town hall and a nice Polish café. And a Pooh-ish smackerel it was time for 26 Upper Mall, a magic address. Reaching the river, just when the sun broke through, was the journey’s best moment. Ebb. A rowing team was training at the beach. Morris used to watch the boat races…

Dear readers, member 7432 here.The world is a violent place. Since the last time I wrote there have been terror and disasters in London and elsewhere. Months have passed since my last blog. What have I been doing, apart from longing to dig into my Morris books and dream about dreamy wallpapers or perfect tea at The William Morris Gallery, some day without deadlines, clocks ticking and terrible news from the world? Most of us in the West are OK, it’s a lot worse elsewhere. I have felt somewhat…

More musings from Member 7432, Sweden’s sole member of the William Morris SocietyDear Readers,The other week I found myself at an antiquarian book fair in Stockholm. I was looking for something Morris, but found a 500 year old German book instead. Suddenly I understood the book collector William Morris more and his intense love for handcrafted manuscripts and getting back to the roots in bookmaking. Here it all was: hand pressed paper, the best ink possible and a lovely, timeless sense of…

Hello again!This is Petter, the one and only Swedish member of The William Morris Society.In my last blog I wrote about how my parents introduced me to William Morris. This got me musing on other British cultural icons when I was growing up and ways they connected to Morris.My first real lesson in English came from The Beatles, you know: “Hello, Goodbye” and “Yes It Is”; what more do you need? ”Why don’t we do it in the Road” was another favourite.Question: did the Beatles have any deeper…

Meet Petter Eklund. Petter is Sweden’s only member of The William Morris Society.Dear Reader,My name is Petter Eklund. I’m the proud member 7432 of The William Morris Society which I joined quite recently. I’m living and working as a freelance writer in Stockholm, Sweden and I am, right now, the only Swedish member of the society. Becoming a member, I started to order quite a few of the society’s wonderful small books of The Kelmscott lectures. They seem to come directly from some wunderkammer…