William S. Peterson was, until his retirement in 2004, Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of fourteen books (several of them about William Morris and his Kelmscott Press) and is a free-lance book-designer. He has also edited two academic journals, Browning Institute Studies and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Currently he and his wife Sylvia are compiling a census of all known copies of the Kelmscott Press Chaucer.