Obituary: Morris Cox

IN 1965 Morris Cox, then aged 62, designed, made and printed at his private press, the Gogmagog Press, in Stratford, east London, a small book printed on and bound in Japanese papers. An Impression of Winter: a landscape panorama, in an edition of 100 copies, sold through the specialist bookseller Bertram Rota's catalogue for pounds 2. Three further seasons followed within a year. The set of four is now usually priced at pounds 1,250.

This success by acclamation was of no profit to Cox, in fact it was a worry to him. He had won a place at West Ham School of Art in 1916, when he was 13. Six years later, solidly trained in drawing, painting, art crafts and, perhaps most importantly, in English literature, he set out to dedicate his life to his art. He drew for advertising agencies, designed book-jackets, for a year ran a shop in Sicilian Avenue, off Holborn in London, selling his work, and he wrote prolifically.

Though the Second World War, when he was team leader in the Civil Defence Light Rescue Service through the Blitz and the buzz-bombs, destroyed his hopes of a professional career as a published author, he never swerved or gave up on his dedication. Of his lifework of over 70 books, all but one - The Whirligig, and other poems (published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1954) - were produced at home in a small room on an office table.

He established the Gogmagog Press in 1957, "essentially an ultra-simple, one-man affair". The first 30 Gogmagog books (Winter was the 13th) have style and perfection and sometimes a unique beauty, handset, printed, often experimentally, with coloured illustrations. In their inventive and inspired but always modest and workmanlike bindings (he liked to use dress materials, silks from South Africa, Japanese or Indian papers), a shelf of Gogmagog books is a joy to behold; there is such energy and life.

When, in 1982, Cox no longer had strength for manual presswork, he produced a further 35 or so books on a small office photocopier. Among these, three novels stand out, reproduced from original 1930s typescripts. The Excursion, subtitled "A Record of a Youthful Day Out in the Reign of George V", records a nonconformist church day trip by rail to the seaside. It has its origins in a diary; to capture the authentic idiom of East End teachers, parents and children, an early (1928) version was dictated, to Morris's friend, later his wife, Wyn Cresswell. The 1985 photocopy edition, of five copies only, reproduces an early-Thirties text tidied for a publisher but never used.

Lil Lilla Beloved, completed in 1931, revised in 1935 and also issued - in an edition of five copies - not until 1985, is again set in London (where Morris spent his entire life) and haunts the imagination of the reader with the love of Ernest Galloway for his illegitimate daughter, a drama of wish-fulfilment. March Demon (five copies, 1984) is an amazing creation, a purely literary (no illustrations) collage anti-novel of 225 pages, literally cut and pasted in a few obsessed weeks in 1938, phrase on phrase, from Sunday School prize books, then to be had 10 a penny from the barrows on Farringdon Road.

Also from Farringdon Road in the Thirties, Morris collected Japanese prints, a major influence, with Max Ernst and Picasso, on his painting and illustration. His literary influences were native and much deeper. Gog and Magog of course are the twin protectors of London, still to be seen at Guildhall. On processions giant wicker figures were paraded with eyes that swivelled and goggled. There was also a tradition of an eye in the back of the head - a cock's eye, maybe cockney's eye, hence cock- eyed.

Cox believed passionately in the intellectual quality of the culture of ordinary people, the wit of their jokes and stories, which are so easily dismissed as superstitions. He followed his sources back through nursery rhyme, parlour songs, Punch and Judy, ballads, to Chaucer and Gawain. The reference title for these explorations would probably be Harold Bayley's Archaic England (1919).

Thanks to the championship of David Chambers, the Private Libraries Association in 1991 published a complete and fairly splendid volume, Gogmagog, a selection of the poems, with biographical and technical notes and a full bibliography. Shortly after this, Morris's personal collection of his work was presented to the Victoria and Albert Museum, who mounted a small but memorable exhibition in his honour.

Morris George Cox, writer, poet and printer: born London 3 May 1903; married 1940 Wyn Cresswell; died London 31 March 1998.