Night and Day

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE HOGARTH PRESS

In 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small used hand-press and began printing books in the dining room of their home, Hogarth House, in Richmond upon Thames, London. The couple originally began the venture as a hobby, a distraction they hoped would alleviate Virginia’s bouts of depression and the emotional duress she suffered from the pressures of writing. In a humble missive written to an unidentified correspondent on December 10, 1930, as an apology for a printing error, Virginia neatly described the operations of the press: “All I have to urge in excuse is that printing is a hobby carried on in the basement of a London house; that as amateurs all instruction in the art was denied us; that we have picked up what we know for ourselves; and that we practise printing in the intervals of lives that are otherwise engaged.” Hogarth’s first publication was a slim volume entitled Two Stories (1917), featuring “The Mark on the Wall,” by Virginia, and “Three Jews,” by Leonard; the printing was limited to 150 copies.

Despite its modest origin, during its first twenty years the Hogarth Press published books by several of the most important writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. Many of these were notables from the Bloomsbury group, to which both Leonard and Virginia belonged. From its inception Hogarth’s catalog was diverse, with stories by Katherine Mansfield and E. M. Forster; the multi-volume series The International Psycho-Analytical Library, which included English translations of Sigmund Freud’s writings; “Stavrogin’s Confession” (1922), an English translation of the lost chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed; Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies, 1931), by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke; Benito Mussolini’s The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1933); H. G. Wells’s The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia (1936); and critical works by Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and John Maynard Keynes.

Leonard and Virginia published according to their tastes rather than releasing safe profit-makers, and they produced many of their favorite titles by hand. One of these was T. S. Eliot’s volume of poetry The Waste Land (1922), which, along with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s own Jacob’s Room (both published the same year), is considered to have officially heralded the modernist movement in literature. In 1923 Hogarth reissued The Waste Land in a handsome hand-printed volume—an edition, like many in Hogarth’s catalog, that is now a highly coveted collector’s item. Virginia wrote to Barbara Bagenal on July 8, 1923: “I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliot’s poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles.”

The Hogarth Press published most of Virginia Woolf’s own writings as well. The 1919 publication of her short story “Kew Gardens,” which included woodcuts by her sister Vanessa Bell, was Hogarth’s first highly successful book. Woolf wrote in a June 10, 1919, diary entry: “We came back from Asheham to find the table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa and we opened them intermittently through dinner.... The pleasure of success was considerably damaged . . . by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing labels, glueing backs, and finally despatching, which used up all spare time and some not spare till this moment.” This small volume transformed the Woolfs’ publishing venture into a serious enterprise.

The Woolfs’ independent ownership of the Hogarth Press allowed Virginia to experiment freely with her writing style; the first notable example of this is her novel Jacob’s Room, published by Hogarth in 1922. Without the interference of editors and strict commercial standards, Woolf toyed as she pleased with the ground-breaking techniques in plot, form, characterization, and treatment of time that established her literary reputation. Other works by Woolf published by the Hogarth Press include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), and Three Guineas (1938). Some of these volumes featured cover designs and woodcuts by Vanessa Bell.

In 1938 Virginia Woolf relinquished her interest as a partner in the press, and an apprentice at Hogarth, John Lehmann, filled her position. Lehmann and Leonard Woolf, however, disagreed on various business issues, and in 1946 Woolf bought Lehmann’s share of the company and sold it to the publisher Chatto and Windus. Hogarth Press became a limited company within this larger house, with Woolf serving as a director on the Hogarth board until his death in 1969. Chatto and Windus was acquired by Random House UK in 1987.