The Merrymount Press was a printing company, both scholarly and craftsmanlike, founded and run by Daniel Berkeley Updike

Daniel Berkeley Updike

Daniel Berkeley Updike was an American printer and historian of typography.Updike was born at Providence, Rhode Island. In 1880 he joined the publishers Houghton, Mifflin & Company, of Boston as an errand boy. He worked for the firm's Riverside Press and trained as a printer but soon moved to...

 in Boston, Massachusetts, and extant during the years 1893–1941. It was perhaps the finest representative of the Arts and Crafts movement

Arts and Crafts movement

Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...

 in American book arts, influenced by William Morris

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

 and founded "to do common work uncommonly well."

Updike established his own studio in 1893, first with the idea of designing type fonts, but soon after as a printing company. He called it the Merrymount Press in honor of Mount Wollaston

Mount Wollaston

Wollaston, Massachusetts, is a neighborhood in the city of Quincy, Massachusetts. Divided by Hancock Street/Route 3A, the Wollaston Beach side is called Wollaston Park, while the Wollaston Hill side is called Wollaston Heights....

 just south of Boston. In 1896, Updike commissioned font designer Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue to design the Merrymount font for an Altar Book for the Episcopal Church. In 1904 Herbert Horne

Herbert Horne

Herbert Percy Horne was an English poet, architect, typographer and designer, art historian and antiquarian. He was an associate of the Rhymer's Club in London...

 designed Montallegro for him, and noted graphic artist and print designer Rudolph Ruzicka

Rudolph Ruzicka

Rudolph Ruzicka prominent Czech-born American wood engraver, etcher, illustrator, typeface designer, and book designer. Ruzicka designed typefaces and wood engraving illustrations for Daniel Berkeley Updike's Merrymount Press, and was a designer for, and consultant to, the Mergenthaler Linotype...

 (1883–1978) also produced designs for the Press.

In 1896 Updike also purchased the Caslon

Caslon

Caslon refers to a number of serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I , and various revivals thereof.Caslon shares the irregularity characteristic of Dutch Baroque types. It is characterized by short ascenders and descenders, bracketed serifs, moderately-high contrast, robust texture, and...

 face; other types employed included Scotch Roman, Janson

Janson

Janson is the name given to an old-style serif typeface named for Dutch punch-cutter and printer Anton Janson. Research in the 1970s and early 1980s, however, concluded that the typeface was the work of a Hungarian punch-cutter named Miklós Tótfalusi Kis...

, Mountjoye and Oxford. Merrymount Press was the first American firm to use the Times New Roman font.

In 1899 the Merrymount Press printed Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton , was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.- Early life and marriage:...

’s novels for Charles Scribner's Sons

Charles Scribner's Sons

Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...

, which firmly established the press as a going commercial concern. The Press's finest work is generally considered to be the Book of Common Prayer

Book of Common Prayer

The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...

 (1930) financed by J. Pierpont Morgan. Without decoration, except a typographic leaf, initial letters, and rubrication, it was an austere and handsome quarto.

Updike estimated that Merrymount Press produced some 14,000 pieces of printing during its existence. Much of it was for the private collectors’ market and limited-editions clubs, but it also printed Christmas cards, bookplates, and advertising ephemera, as well as work for publishers, libraries, churches, and other institutions.

Most of the Merrymount Press archives are conserved in the Boston Athenaeum.