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Hogarth Press

book jacket designs, memoirs, and cultural history

book jacket designs, memoirs, and cultural history

Virginia Woolf – The Years

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Years cover - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Leonard Woolf and many critics of the time considered The Years badly flawed in characterization and structure. Recent critics, however, mostly feminist, have opened up the novel in interesting ways, making virtues out of what were thought vices. Among other points, they have argued that The Years offers compelling evidence of Virginia Woolf’s courage and genius in confronting and remaking herself as a woman in a sexist world, in focusing her frustrations to expose traditional masculine myths of marriage and sex. Such criticism and the textual studies of her revisions have made the novel seem one of the more interesting and ambitious of Woolf’s books, its very ambiguities and muted anger part of its qualities. Leonard Woolf and the early male critics though it inferior to Virginia’s great modernist novels, but the average reader in 1937 had no such qualms, flocking to it with relief after the difficulties of The Waves.

In spite of his reservations about its literary virtues, Leonard anticipated its popularity and ordered over 18,000 copies of The Years for publication on March 15, 1937. Its commercial success completely overshadowed Virginia’s other novels. It sold over 13,000 copies in the first six months. In America, Harcourt Brace printed 10,000 copies for the first edition and quickly reprinted, as The Years sold over 30,000 copies in six months. It became an authentic American best-seller for 1937, ranking sixth on a list led by such heady company as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Kenneth Roberts’ Northwest Passage and outranking John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. One check alone from Harcourt Brace on January 5, 1938 total led over $5,000.”

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

In 1937 Virginia Woolf appeared on the cover of Time magazine: she had achieved a remarkable level of critical recognition and esteem that was now translated into more popular acclaim and fame. The initial print run of The Years was the largest of any of Woolf’s novels to that date. The focus of the novel is the passage of time as it traces the Pargiter family from 1880 up to the ‘Present Day’. The novel met with high praise. David Garnett said the book “marks her as the greatest master of English” and is “the finest novel she has ever written” (New Statesman & Nation). Subsequent critical assessments have been more mixed. The novel sold very well in England and America making its way on to American best-seller lists. Vanessa Bell’s jacket for the book features a rose surrounded by geometric patterns and is signed with her full name.

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: Art, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, The Years, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – Three Guineas

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Three Guineas - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

This is the second of Virginia Woolf’s overtly feminist polemics. In it, she develops the ideas first put forward in A Room of One’s Own and launches an incisive critique of the English establishment – concentrating on its principal bases of power – the House of Lords, the military establishment, the Church, and the educational system.

“Virginia Woolf’s reading notebooks and scrapbooks [reveal] how much labour went into [her] gathering of facts: twelve volumes of notes, including three scrapbooks compiled between 1931 and 1937. In the power, anger, wit, and satire of her attack on repressive masculine institutions, Woolf chose not to write in the discourse of a traditional historian, sociologist, politician, suffragist, or guildswoman. She developed her arguments, cited her examples, digressed through provocative and unorthodox footnotes, to flail the misogyny and militarism of the patriarchal establishment with all the craft of the essayist and novelist. If she took little notice of the feminist history or the sociopolitical status of women in the 1930s as documented by Strachey and others, her book proved so welcome an offensive against enduring male sexist attitudes that her sisters in the trenches overlooked her lapses. They gleefully applauded her achievement.”

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

Three Guineas considers women’s role in society, and more particularly, what they might do to prevent war.Woolf traces fascist elements within England’s education system and professions, highlighting monetary and material inequities of class and gender. She argues that “the public and the private worlds are insperably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other”.

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, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

To the Lighthouse cover - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Advance sales totaled over 1,600 copies, more than twice the number for Mrs Dalloway. Virginia’s mood at the time expressed itself in her gaily ironic joke with Vita Sackville-West. When Vita returned from her second trip to Persia, she found a copy of To the Lighthouse waiting for her, inscribed by Virginia, “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written”. It was a bound dummy copy, with blank pages. Leonard Woolf, anticipating both an artistic and a commercial success for To the Lighthouse, ordered 3,000 copies printed by R. & R. Clark (a thousand more than Mrs Dalloway) and quickly ordered another 1,000 copies in a second impression. The novel outsold her previous fiction. The American publisher of Hogarth Press books, Harcourt Brace, printed 4,000 copies initially (almost twice the number of copies for Mrs Dalloway). American readers had begun to take notice of Woolf’s novels.”

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, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

William Plomer – Sado

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Sado - first edition

 
William Plomer, Sado (1931) Cover design by John Armstrong.

“The first version of Sado ran to some 170,000 words, as Plomer wrote to Woolf in February, but he soon boiled it down to half that length. He sent the revised typescript to the Woolfs two months later just as they returned to London after driving through western France for two weeks on their annual outing. Refreshed from their trip, the Woolfs read Plomer’s novel immediately, Leonard writing to him five days later on Friday that both he and Virginia liked the book very much. They were struck by Plomer’s writing and his psychological insights, finding the theme [of homo-eroticism] “extraordinarily interesting” and his prose less uneven than his previous writing, with “fewer, if any, air pockets”. With the publication of Sado, Plomer reached maturity as a writer. Leonard had over 1,500 copies of the novel printed and issued with a handsomely stylized dust jacket in white and blue designed by John Armstrong. In spite of its promising send-off, Sado disappointed by selling only 837 copies in the first six months and by going in the red over £64 in the first year.”

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, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Literary studies, Sado, William Plomer

Woolf’s-head Publishing

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Highlights and Newlights of the Hogarth Press

Woolf’s-head Publishing was produced to coincide with the exhibition of Hogarth Press publications which ran from February to April 2009 at the library of the University of Alberta, Canada. It’s not only a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It’s typeset in Caslon Old Face, which Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf used when they first set up the Hogarth Press on a table in their dining room in 1917.

Hogarth Press The book’s dust jacket is printed on thick, richly textured paper with some of the exuberantly patterned papers originally used by the Press. It also features both of the woolf’s-head logos used by the Press, designed by Vanessa Bell and E. McKnight Kauffer. Even the interior pages of the book are coloured, using tints and washes which are a tonal echo of the original designs.

Many of the book jacket illustrations by Vanessa Bell are already quite well known. But there are others by John Banting, Kauffer, and Trekkie Parsons (Leonard Woolf’s ‘lover’ after Virginia’s death) which illustrate the wide and imaginative range of visual approaches the Woolfs took for the presentation of their publications.

However, it’s difficult for book jackets of this kind not to look rather dated today, almost a hundred years after their first appearance. But what definitely do not look dated are the richly patterned papers Leonard imported from Czechoslovakia and Japan for the volumes of poetry. These look as visually fresh today as they did at the time.

The authors represented stretch from the famous names who made the Press such a commercially successful venture – T.S.Eliot, Freud, Woolf, Vita Sackville-West – to people who have since disappeared into literary obscurity – Ena Limebeer, R.C.Trvelyan, and Virginia’s sixteen-year-old discovery Joan Adeney Easdale.

There are also what author and exhibition curator Elizabeth Gordon describes as ‘surprises’ – books ‘less commonly associated with the Hogarth Press’. These include a Canadian poet, a Bengali biography, translations of German poetry, (reflecting Leonard’s internationalism) and even a diet book.

Quack! Quack!The other Press publications upon which the collection focuses are those by Virginia Woolf herself – all illustrated by her sister Vanessa Bell. There are also examples of the polemical essays published in the 1930s, which included arguments against Imperialism and in favour of feminism (of which Leonard was a champion). A short series of public letters even included ‘A Letter to Adolf Hitler’ by Louis Golding.

Best-sellers include Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), William Plomer’s detective thriller The Case is Altered (1932) and Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939).

This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it has 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.

Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK

Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and Newlights of the Hogarth Press, Alberta (CA): University of Alberta, 2009, pp.144, ISBN: 9781551952406


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press Tagged With: Bibliography, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Virginia Woolf, Woolf's Head Publishing

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