About Us

CYNEHELM PRESS is an independently owned & operated Canadian micropress. Our digital and print editions leverage the latest in modern publishing tools & technologies to recreate the elegance and beauty of the great books of the past.

Why “Cynehelm”?

The short, pragmatic, uninteresting answer is that it's easy to Google. Web searches for the word Cynehelm consistently lead here, as the word has fallen out of fashion in English since about 800CE.

Language & Etymology
The word Cynehelm is an Old English compound word whose components have survived into the modern language. It's kind of obvious: cyne- comes from cyning, the original form of the modern word “king,” and helm meaning “helm.” It's a kenning, or a compound expression with a metaphorical meaning: in this case, what is the helm of a king? What is the thing a king wears on his head? A crown.

This is on one hand a trollish answer to the reality that, by law in Canada, private companies can't trade under a name that connotes a relationship to the King, the Crown in general, or the government. So any trade name that reads "Crown" on its face is right out. Folding the concept of a crown into an Old Saxon kenning, which is enough to satisfy the law, seemed like a slick move.

Besides, there's nothing as cunning as a kenning of cyning.

Somewhere along the way, as the Law of Laziness has transformed the language, we've forgotten that the root of the word cyning is basically the word “kin,” which means the same thing today as it did then: the people who are like you, alike you, or akin to you, with a powerful familial connotation. Baked into the word “king” is the idea that a king is above all a representative of the people. The Cynehelm can be read as “the king's helm,” but it can also be read as the people's helm, which is what we prefer here.

While a King-helm, a crown, offers little practical protection, a Kin-helm could be anything that protects the heads and brains of an entire populace. What better armour is there to strengthen and protect the brains of the people like the armour of a good book?

History
There is, of course, another referential meaning folded into the press's name that descends by way of William Morris, the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite polymath at the center of the Arts & Crafts movement.

Morris was a poet, a painter, a designer, a storyteller, a medieval scholar, and especially a pioneer of the modern indie publishing house. His own one-man indie press, Kelmscott Press, operated out of Morris's house, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, publishing 53 books between 1891 and 1898—all of which were designed and hand-printed by Morris himself, some with illustrations by fellow Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones.

Don't be fooled by the Oxford English Dictionary's limited online definition of "Kelmscott." It's almost certainly "Kelm's Cott," derived from the saint to which the local parish church, is consecrated, St. Kenelm. Kenelm was a king of Mercia in modern-day Gloucester; a decent summary of his life exists on the web here. And Kenelm, as it's recorded, is likely a clipped version of the old name Cynehelm . . . like the press!

Morris's Kelmscott Press was a deliberate anachronism, hearkening back to the earliest print books of the 15th century and to a romanticized Middle Ages in which the book itself was as much a work of art as its contents.

The tradition and values of Morris's now-iconic press are strangely well suited to the ultra-small indie press of the 21st century. The growing quality of print-on-demand (POD) manufacture and the rise of the ebook have empowered us to carry on a rich tradition of publishing that looks backward to a time of elegancy and artistry, and forward to the ways our innovative technology enable us to answer the challenges of our own troubled times the way we once did—with literature, poetry, and art serving as the vessel from which the intellectual cocktail Matthew Arnold described as “the best that is known and thought” may still be poured.