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Hogarth Press

book jacket designs, memoirs, and cultural history

book jacket designs, memoirs, and cultural history

Roger Fry – Twelve Original Woodcuts

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Roger Fry - Twelve Original Woodcuts - first edition

 
150 copies were printed. Squarish octavo, unpaginated, title page + 12 original woodcuts, each printed on a separate sheet.

A copy of the third impression, printed in 1922 is currently described as: “Internally the pages are bright and clean, and the woodcuts are good impressions. The original wrapper has a small closed tear along the front top edge, and a bit of light soiling, otherwise in very good condition. Very scarce in any of the impressions. Price $3,000.00”

See digital slide show of this publication at Duke University Library

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Literary studies, Roger Fry, Woodcuts

Sigmund Freud – The Ego and the Id

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Ego and the Id - first edition

 
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1927) The International Psycho-Analytic Library, No.12

“From 1922 to 1939 the International Psycho-Analytic Library offered nine of Freud’s books and two Epitomes. Joan Riviere translated two of the nine books, James Strachey two books (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1922, and An Autobiographical Study, 1935), and Alix Strachey one book (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 1936). Only four other translators were entrusted with translating Freud’s books in the series: C.M.J. Hubback (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1922), W.D Robson-Scott (The Future of an Illusion, 1928). W.J.H. Sprott (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1933), and Katherine Jones (Moses and Monotheism, 1939).”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

It was James Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother, who arranged to have the Hogarth Press become the publisher for the books of the International Psycho-Analytic Library in 1924. The Press bought the rights to the previously published titles in the ILP series, inheriting the already printed volumes (bearing the International Psycho-Analytic Press imprint) along with the rights to Freud’s Collected Papers for £800. Thus the Hogarth Press became the publisher of Freud in English, making a major contribution to twentieth-century thought and increasing the international importance of the Press. Freud’s Collected Papers also became one of the Press’s most successful publications. Freud’s reputation grew tremendously in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ego and the Id, along with other works by Freud, were an important part of the Press list for decades.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id

T.S.Eliot – Poems

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

T.S.Eliot - Poems - first edition

 
T.S. Eliot, Poems (1918)

This was the third publication of the Hogarth Press. It includes the poems ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Le spectateur’, ‘Mélange adultère de tout’, ‘Lune de miel’, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, and ”Whispers of immortality’. All seven of the poems had appeared previously in the Little Review.

“In 1918 we printed two small books: Poems by T.S. Eliot and Kew Gardens by Virginia. Of Tom’s Poems we printed rather fewer than 250 copies. We published it in May 1919 price 2s. 6d. and it went out of print in the middle of 1920.

We took a good deal of trouble to find some rather unusual, gay Japanese paper for the covers. For many years we gave much time and care to find beautiful, uncommon, and sometimes cheerful paper for binding our books, and, as the first publishers to do this, I think we started a fashion which many of the regular, old established publishers followed. We got papers from all over the place, including some brilliantly patterned from Czechoslovakia, and we also had some marbled covers made for us by Roger Fry’s daughter in Paris. I bought a small quantity of Caslon Old Face Titling type and used it for printing the covers.

Caslon Old Style Titling Font

Caslon Old Style Titling Font

The publication of T.S.Eliot’s Poems must be marked as a red letter day for the Press and for us … Tom showed us some of the poems which he had just written and we printed seven of them and published them in the slim paper covered book. It included three remarkable poems which are still, I think, vintage Eliot: ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. and ”Whispers of immortality’.”

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, T.S.Eliot

T.S.Eliot – The Waste Land

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Waste Land - first edition

 
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1923)

This was published three times in America before it appeared under the Hogarth Press imprint. First it had been published in Criterion (October 1922), the magazine of which Eliot himself was editor, which was funded by rich patroness Lady Rothermere. Then it was published in Dial the following month, still without the famous explanatory ‘notes’. Finally it was published in book form by Boni and Liveright in December 1922.

Eliot himself suggested that the explanatory notes were an addition of ‘bogus scholarship’ devised to bulk out the number of pages in an otherwise slim publication. Virginia Woolf set the entire poem in type herself. It was issued in an edition of 470 copies with blue marbled boards probably prepared by Vanessa Bell. T.S. Eliot earned £7 5s. in royalties.

The Waste Land went on to become one of the most famous texts of the modernist movement – along with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses – and an iconic publication for modern poetry.

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land

The Hogarth Press

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Hogarth Press 1917—1941

The Hogarth Press was established by Leonard Woolf in 1917 as a therapeutic hobby for his wife Virginia Woolf who was recovering from one of her frequent bouts of ill-health. It was named after Hogarth House in Richmond, London, where they were living at the time. Its first manifestation was a small hand press which they installed on the dining table in their home. They also bought two boxes of type, which was used to hand-set the texts they produced. Working from a sixteen page instructional handbook, they taught themselves how to set the type and print a decent page. What started as an amateur diversion became one of the pillars of European modernism.

The Hogarth PressThe Woolfs have proved endlessly interesting as individuals and as central players in the drama of Bloomsbury. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to their achievement as publishers. But with ten years research behind his endeavour, John Willis brings the remarkable story of their success as publishers to life. You might expect a book of this kind to be not much more than a long descriptive catalogue of publications, but in fact he generates interesting thumbnail sketches of Hogarth’s authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus

He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press, as well as the minute details of its finances which Leonard Woolf left behind as a legacy of his administrative skills and background.

The press is best known for its fiction, but it also ventured into poetry – supported by a £200 a year subsidy from Dorothy Wellesley. But despite attracting many of the brightest young talents of the inter-war years, none of these publications broke even. The whole enterprise was kept afloat by its best-selling stars, who just happened to be the one-time lovers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West.

Leonard Woolf is rightly famous for his shrewd commercial judgements and his fanatical bookkeeping, yet the press also took on an amazing range of authors – from an unknown sixteen year old girl (Joan Adeney Easdale) to the ‘working class’ John Hampson (Saturday Night at the Greyhound) and arch modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Rainer Maria Rilke (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge).

What’s not so well known is that the Hogarth Press published a great deal on politics – from polemical essays on current affairs to substantial works of political and economic philosophy, particularly anti-imperialism and the promotion of internationalism, which was of particular interest to Leonard Woolf. A measure of his astuteness as a businessman was his publication of Mussolini’s article ‘The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism’ in 1933.

The Maurice Dobbs and the Sidney Webbs of this era published books and pamphlets arguing that Soviet communism offered a positive alternative to the nationalism and imperialism of the European powers which had led to the horrors of the First World War.

Their fundamental error, now more easily observed with the benefit of hindsight, is that they took all the data for their analysis directly from the Soviet regime itself, which we now know was based on lies, falsehoods, corruption, and deceit. They were bamboozled, and didn’t check their facts. Few escaped the God that Failed embarrassment – but Leonard Woolf was one of them, and he deserves to be more highly regarded because of it.

It’s interesting to note that many of the same issues which are being debated at the end of the first century of the twenty-first century were alive eighty years ago – educational reforms, anti-Imperialism, international finance, unemployment, and capitalism in crisis.

Willis’s account also features the strained and often difficult relationships which were created when Leonard Woolf took on assistants and partners in the firm – the best known of whom was John Lehmann, who had two periods of tenure. The partnership approach foundered because Leonard insisted on sticking to his independent commercial practises, and in the end he was proved right.

He was also right in his judgement that the English-speaking world was ready for psycho-analysis and the works of Freud. He took the bold step of publishing translations (some by friends, James and Alix Strachey) of the International Psycho-Analytic Library, as well as Freud’s Collected Papers.

This is a fascinating work which embraces literature, poetry, politics, feminism, international affairs, the mechanics of publishing, and a general account of cultural history in UK of the inter-war years – sometimes referred to as ‘the long weekend’.

There are three ideal audiences for this book: fans of Bloomsbury who want to know about one of its most productive enterprises; bibliophiles who are interested in a company which produced fine objects which were culturally significant but still made money; and cultural historians who might wish to ponder the significance of an enterprise which started out as a table-top hobby and became a major national cultural force.

© Roy Johnson 2005

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US


J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41, London: University of Virginia Press, 1992, pp.451, ISBN: 0813913616


More on Leonard Woolf
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Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Virginia Woolf

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

from hobby to major cultural enterprise

Hogarth Press 1917-1987
The Hogarth Press 1917-1987 was established by Leonard Woolf in 1917 as a therapeutic hobby for his wife Virginia Woolf who was recovering from one of her frequent bouts of ill-health. It was named after Hogarth House in Richmond, London, where they were living at the time. Its first manifestation was a small hand press which they installed on the dining table in their home. They also bought two boxes of type, which was used to hand-set the texts they produced. Working from a sixteen page instructional handbook, they taught themselves how to set the type, lock it up in chases, and print a decent page. Their first project, Two Stories, was a thirty-one page hand-printed booklet containing a story by each of them – Leonard’s Two Jews and Virginia’s The Mark on the Wall. One hundred and fifty copies were printed and bound on their dining table and sold by subscription amongst friends. These are now highly valued collectors’ items. (See the book jacket and a bibilographic description.)

More small books followed, many of them written by their friends. Fortunately for the success of the Press, they just happened to be connected with the most amazingly avant-guard (and yet popular) names of their day. The list of people published by the Hogarth Press is like a role call of cultural modernism: Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot. They even went on to become the official publishers of the works of Sigmund Freud, via their connections with James Strachey – his English translator and brother of their friend Lytton Strachey.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Many of the book jackets were designed by Virginia’s sister, the designer and painter Vanessa Bell. Other covers in the early series were designed by Dora Carrington and Roger Fry. The jacket covers were considered very modern for the period, and they helped to establish a recognisable house style, which contributed to the success of the Press.

Within ten years, the Hogarth Press was a full-scale publishing house and included on its list such seminal works as Eliot’s The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Freud’s Collected Papers. Leonard Woolf remained the main director of the publishing house from its beginning in 1917 until his death in 1969.

There was no formal agreement about policy: they simply published work which they liked or thought was important. They did all the most menial tasks of running a small home-based publishing business themselves. Virginia spent hours wrapping up books in brown paper parcels and tying them up with string for dispatch to booksellers. She even set the text of The Waste Land by hand, using a compositor’s stick.

In 1921 the Press was equipped with more sophisticated printing equipment and moved to new premises in Tavistock Square. It also began to publish translations of works of Russian literature by writers such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Checkhov, and Gorky.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Virginia Woolf is now well known for her love-affair with fellow writer Vita Sackville-West. What is not so well-known is that Sackville-West’s work, such as her long poem The Land (1926) and her novel All Passion Spent (1931) was also published by the Hogarth Press. In fact it sold far more copies than Woolf’s work at the same time. She was a best-selling writer in every sense of the term, making money for the Press and handsome royalties for herself. It’s to her credit that even when wooed by other publishers promising her larger advances, she stayed loyal to the firm. The Land was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1926, which added to the firm’s prestige.

Leonard Woolf kept the accounts for all commercial activity with the same rigour and the attention to detail that he had learned from his days as a colonial administrator. He made it a policy to answer every letter he received the same day as it landed on his desk. Each penny that went in or out of Hogarth Press was noted by him with anal-retentive exactitude – though as one of his many assistants records, this also reveals something of his dual nature:

Leonard himself was, in general, cool and philosophical about the ups and downs of publishing: his fault was in allowing trifles to upset him unduly. A penny, a halfpenny that couldn’t be accounted for in the petty cash at the end of the day would send him into a frenzy that often approached hysteria… On the other hand, if a major setback occurred – a new impression, say, of a book that was selling fast lost at sea on its way from the printers in Edinburgh – he would display a sage-like calm, and shrug his shoulders.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987As their enterprise became more successful and the volume of business grew, they felt they needed more help. A succession of younger men were employed to help run the Press – many of them aspirant young writers themselves. Amongst them was Richard Kennedy, a sixteen year old boy, who recorded his very amusing memories of the experience in A Boy at the Hogarth Press. Others included Ralph Partridge, George Rylands, Angus Davidson and John Lehmann.

John Lehmann was the longest lasting and the most serious member of the firm, He was the brother of actress Beatrix Lehmann and novelist Rosamund Lehmann, and he had two spells of employment. He worked first as an apprentice manager from 1931 to 1932. Then in 1938 when Virginia Woolf chose to give up the practical drudgery of packing and typesetting, he bought out her share and returned as part-owner and general manager.

He had ideas to transform the Hogarth Press from a cottage industry into a fully-fledged modern publishing business, and he proposed that they should raise share capital and employ publicists and agents. But his ambitions were antithetical to all Leonard’s principles of self-reliance, independence, and control. Leonard argued – quite rightly as it turned out – that the strength of the Press was its independence and its policy of working with minimum overheads and outlay. He stuck to his guns, and was proved right in the end. Lehmann describes the conflict of views from his point of view in Thrown to the Woolfs, whilst Leonard gives his version of events (complete with balance sheets) in his magnificent Autobiography.

In 1939 the Press moved to Mecklenburgh Square, but it was bombed out in September 1940 during the first air raids on London. A temporary refuge was found with its printers, the Garden City Press, in Letchworth.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Curiously enough, as John Lehmann records in his account of these years, these disasters proved to be a benefit to the press. Its editorial offices and stock rooms were in the same building as its printers, and both were a long way away from London, where other publishers were suffering losses to their inventory as a result of air raids during the war. The odd thing is that despite paper rationing, sales rose, because of general shortages: “Books that in peacetime, when there was an abundance of choice, would have sold only a few copies every month, were snapped up the moment they arrived in the shops.”

Priority was given to keeping Virginia Woolf’s works in print even after her death, as well as the works of Sigmund Freud which the Press had started to publish. Other writers whose work appeared around this time were Henry Green, Roy Fuller, and William Sansom.

However, following Viginia’s death in 1941, there remained only two essential decision makers on policy. Without her casting vote, the differences between Lehmann and Leonard Woolf grew wider and led to clashes. Lehmann wanted to publish Saul Bellow and Jean Paul Sartre, but Leonard said ‘No’. There were also misunderstandings about income tax returns and the foreign rights to Virginia’s work.

The Hogarth Press 1917-1987Disagreements rumbled on until after the war had ended. When the final split between them came about in 1946, Leonard solved the financial problem of raising £3,000 to keep the company afloat by persuading fellow publisher Ian Parsons of Chatto and Windus to buy out John Lehmann’s share. The Hogarth Press became a limited company within Chatto & Windus, on the strict understanding that Leonard Woolf had a controlling decision on what the Hogarth Press published.

Ian Parsons was the husband of Trekkie Parsons, who had illustrated some Hogarth titles. She lived with Leonard during the week and with her husband at weekends – so they became business partners as well as sharing a wife. The slightly bizarre nature of this relationship is recorded in their collected Love Letters.

In the period after 1946, the most important books published by the Press were the multi-volume editions of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries and Letters, the twenty-four volume set of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1953-1974), as well as Leonard Woolf’s Autobiography. Following Leonard’s death in 1969, ownership of the Press was transferred to Random House UK in 1987 when it bought out Chatto & Windus.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.


More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature


Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Virginia Woolf

Thrown to the Woolfs

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press

John Lehmann joined the Hogarth Press as a trainee manager in 1931 when it was in the full flush of its first success. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse had just been published, as well as T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land and Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude. This was to be the first of two periods of engagement with the Press, the second of which lasted until 1946. Thrown to the Woolfs his account of publishing and the literary world of the 1930’s is dominated by the figure of Leonard Woolf, whose own account of the Hogarth Press in his Autobiography confirms almost all of what Lehmann says – though they differed over issues of policy.

Thrown to the WoolfsIt’s a rather unglamorous world of working strict office hours in crowded basement rooms, with “a ramshackle lavatory, in which old Hogarth Press galley proofs were provided as toilet paper”. He was delighted to be mixing with some of the major figures of the modernist period, as well as the up-and-coming writers of the day. There are sketches of writers of the period with whom Lehmann dealt: Michael Roberts, William Plomer, and Christopher Isherwood, whom he introduced to the Press as the Great Hope of English Fiction (which people believed at the time).

He does his best to be fair to Leonard Woolf, and his portrait corresponds accurately to that which one gains from other accounts, including Woolf’s own:

Leonard himself was, in general, cool and philosophical about the ups and downs of publishing: his fault was in allowing trifles to upset him unduly. A penny, a halfpenny that couldn’t be accounted for in the petty cash at the end of the day would send him into a frenzy that often approached hysteria… On the other hand, if a major setback occurred – a new impression, say, of a book that was selling fast lost at sea on its way from the printers in Edinburgh – he would display a sage-like calm, and shrug his shoulders.

It’s quite obvious from his account that although he was being employed in commerce as a publisher’s assistant, to write adverts, promote sales, and check proofs, his heart was set on being a ‘poet’ himself. The tensions he felt with Leonard Woolf became more serious, and within two years of securing what he at first thought of as his dream job, he gave in his notice and left under a very dark cloud.

He then gives an account of his wanderings in central Europe, inspired by Rilke’s notion that “In order to write a single verse, one must see many cities” (not having read Emily Dickinson, it would seem). Much of this part of the story revolves around Christopher Isherwood and Lehmann’s efforts in publishing the collection New Writing. But in 1938, having made up with the Woolfs, he bought out Virginia’s share of the Press and rejoined it as manager and full partner.

The theme then becomes ‘How does one run a publishing company during a war?’. The odd thing is that despite paper rationing, despite being bombed out of its premises in Mecklenburgh Square, and despite having to transfer the Press and its business to Letchworth, sales rose, because of general shortages:

Books that in peacetime, when there was an abundance of choice, would have sold only a few copies every month, were snapped up the moment they arrived in the shops.

Priority was given to keeping Virginia Woolf’s works in print even after her death, as well as the works of Sigmund Freud which the Press had started to publish. Other writers whose work appeared around this time were Henry Green, Roy Fuller, and William Sansom.

However, following Viginia’s death in 1941, there remained only two essential decision makers on policy. Without her casting vote, the differences between them grew wider and led to clashes. Lehmann wanted to publish Saul Bellow and Jean Paul Sartre, but Leonard said ‘No’. There were also misunderstandings about income tax returns and the foreign rights to Virginia’s work.

When the final split between them came about, Leonard solved the problem by persuading fellow publisher Ian Parsons of Chatto and Windus to buy out John Lehmann’s share. Parsons was the husband of Trekkie Parsons, who lived with Leonard during the week and with her husband at weekends – so as well as sharing a wife, they became business partners.

John Lehmann eventually went on to found his own publishing company, and the Hogarth Press was absorbed into Chatto and Windus on Leonard’s death in 1969. This is an interesting account of their joint efforts – partisan, but reasonable and humanely argued.

For literary historians it’s an interesting account of English culture and letters in the 1930s and the war years. And it’s also a fascinating glimpse into the world of commercial publishing. Anyone who wants to make judgments about the rights and wrongs in the disputes between the principals should also read Leonard Woolf’s excellent Autobiography.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Thrown to the Woolfs Buy the book at Amazon UK

Thrown to the Woolfs Buy the book at Amazon US


John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978, pp.164, ISBN 0030521912


More on Leonard Woolf
Twentieth century literature
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Business, Hogarth Press, John Lehmann, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Thrown to the Woolfs

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

A Room of One's Own - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

This has become one of the cornerstone’s of feminist theory in relation to literature. It’s a sparkling, critical, and wide-ranging expose of male privilege and the way in which women have been excluded from cultural life. However, as John Willis argues in his study of the text, Woolf omitted to mention the work of other women writers on the same subject which had appeared prior to her own.

“There was more fiction than fact in Woolf’s most famous and beloved feminist polemic. The occasion was an address to the young women of Newham and Girton colleges on the subject of women and fiction, which she subsequently rewrote into the expanded form of the published book. Woolf’s form followed function. She created clever and pointed fictions before their eyes, inventing, among others, Shakespeare’s thwarted sister Judith and the young modern novelist Mary Carmichael. There were few facts partly because she presumed to dislike them and partly because the works on women containing the facts (all erroneous) had been written by men. Woolf chose not to recognise the existence of useful, accurate, and understanding accounts of women by women. Nor did she mention directly the achievements of women such as [Millicent Garrett] Fawcett, [Ray] Strachey, or [Margaret Llewellyn] Davis. Strachey’s The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s movement in Great Britain (1928) was a year old when Woolf created her story of her own room and an inheritance of £500 per year, yet there is only a brief quotation from it, identified in a footnote. Facts aside, the wit and irony of her writing, her satirical exposure of patriarchal attitudes, her leaps of intuitive understanding, [and] her subjective experience made the book memorable and influential.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

The first one hundred copies of [the first, limited edition] were for sale by the Hogarth Press, and the price was substantial. The Hogarth Press’s trade edition, issued at the same time, was priced at 5s; the print run was 3,040 copies. The press published a number of books that come at the same question of women’s lives and positions in different ways. One of particular interest is Life As We Have Known It (1931), a collection of autobiographical sketches of guildswomen, for which Woolf wrote an introductory letter.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: A Room of One's Own, Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – Between the Acts

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Between the Acts cover - first edition
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1939) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Leonard Woolf decided after Virginia’s death to publish Between the Acts as she had written it, editing only for spelling and minor textual errors. John Lehmann supported him completely in this decision. The critical success and popularity of the book give evidence that Virginia had found her way into a new fusion of form and vision after The Years. After her death, Leonard carefully planned for the future, husbanding her stories, essays, and letters for judiciously timed collections. Over the next seventeen years, through 1958, Leonard published eight posthumous collections of Virginia’s writing, releasing a volume every two or three years on a schedule that approximated her production when alive. In this way Leonard kept Virginia’s name before the public and assisted in her growing critical acclaim. Even in death, Virginia Woolf remained the most productive and profitable of the Hogarth Press writers.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US


The Hogarth Press
Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Between the Acts, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – Jacob’s Room

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Jacob's Room cover - first edition

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922) Cover design by Vanessa Bell

This was the first of Virginia Woolf’s novels to be self-published. She took the opportunity of being free from someone else’s editorial control to push the boundaries of her experimental literary technique. It thus marked an important step in modernism and a breakthrough to a greater degree of self-confidence in her work.

“Virginia’s Jacob’s Room was our first major work, a full-length novel. 1,200 copies of it were printed for us by R. and R. Clark of Edinburgh. [It] was published in October 1922 and began at once to sell fairly briskly, and I had a second impression of 1,000 copies printed by Clark. By the end of 1923 we had sold 1,413 copies; the cost of printing and publishing up to that date had been £276 1s. 6d. and the receipts had been £318 6s. 0d., so that our publisher’s profit was £42 4s. 6d. We though that we had done extremely well.”

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography

The publication of Jacob’s Room includes a series of firsts in and of itself. It is the first novel published by the Press: it is also the first book to have a dust jacket…The dust jacket for Jacob’s Room was a “collaborative effort: Vanessa made the drawing, Virginia chose the terra-cotta colouring, and Leonard Woolf advised alterations to the lettering”. The dust jacket, however, was not well received. Leonard recalls that because the design “did not represent a desirable female or even Jacob or his room, and it was what in 1923 many people would have called reproachfully post-impressionist. It was almost universally condemned amongst the booksellers”.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

previousnext

 


Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005


Filed Under: Hogarth Press Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Jacob's Room, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

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