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Robert Graves – The Feather Bed

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

The Feather Bed - first edition

 
Robert Graves, The Feather Bed (1923)

Cover design by William Nicholson. Number 210 of 250 copies signed by the author.

“As the books and pamphlets on political subjects grew in number and importance, the Woolfs continued to publish more volumes of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism in 1926 than in any other areas. A significant event was the publication of another book in 1926 by Robert Graves. He published a pamphlet on poetry and brought with him Laura Riding. Graves met Laura Riding Gottschalk in 1926 after he had published his first Hogarth Press essay on modern poetry.”

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

The Hogarth Press published a total of seven works by Graves, the first of which was The Feather Bed. This book consists of an “Introductory Letter” to John Crowe Ransom (his name misspelled “Ransome”) and an unconventional poem: a young man’s monologue that focussed on “internal debate about the nature of love, sexuality, and the religious calling of nuns and priests”. The book generated interest and sold quite well, though no subsequent edition of the poem was issued. The painter William Nicholson, Graves’s father-in-law, provided the cover for the book.

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

Roger Fry – Twelve Original Woodcuts

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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

Roger Fry a biography

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portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

This is one of the last books Virginia Woolf wrote, and it is a tribute from one artist to another, an account of Fry’s aesthetics, and one of her many excursions into biography. Actually, Roger Fry A Biography is almost a joint production, because much of the text is direct quotations from Fry’s own journals and his letters to friends. It starts with his family background of radical Quakers, a quite strict upbringing, and his interest in science and the natural world.

Roger Fry A Biography He was a studious youth who blossomed when he went to Cambridge and was elected to the semi-secret society of Apostles who were what would be called free-thinkers (and coincidentally formed the basis of what would later be the Bloomsbury Group). He was older than the other members of this group, and always held in high regard by them. Despite getting a first in science, he switched to the study of Art and travelled to Italy and France on a sort of autodidactic Grand Tour to bring himself into contact with the masters.

Apart from her obvious sympathy with his artistic ideas, Woolf’s approach is largely descriptive. There is little attempt at analysis of her material. And we have to put up with her reticence on personal matters to a a degree which is almost infuriating. As a young man Fry forms a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother, who teaches him ‘the art of love’, and they remain friends to the end of life. Yet this relationship is covered in less than a paragraph, and the woman isn’t even named.

Ever after Cambridge, his problem was how to earn a living from art, and even when he got married to fellow art-lover Helen Coombe, he was still living off an income from his father. But he found work as a lecturer, wrote art criticism, got nowhere as a painter, and was eventually employed by Pierpont Morgan to buy pictures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Woolf makes a great deal of his organising the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition which caused such a rumpus (and which she claimed changed human nature). She sees this as a turning point in Fry’s life, and yet the strange thing is that at the very point that he joins the Bloomsbury Group (and where she has first-hand knowledge of his relationships with its members) she remains annoyingly coy about his personal life.

You would not know from her account that he had an affair with her sister Vanessa Bell. His life as a human being is replaced by the artistic debates which raged about Post-Impressionism, Fry’s own artistic theories, and the foundation of the Omega workshops.

Lots of well-known figures flit across the pages – George Bernard Shaw, Elgar, Lytton Strachey, André Gide – but we are as remote from his personal life as ever. Even his late life affair with Helen Anrep is mentioned almost parenthetically – though he was to live with her for the rest of his life (whilst his wife died slowly from a brain disease in a Retreat at York).

You can see why Woolf found his critical theory interesting. He was searching for a synthesis which would embrace visual art and literature, and he was modest enough to admit that his aesthetic opinions were subjective and limited:

But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is` likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely a-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality—they are rather the mechanism of civil life—the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours.

She writes very appreciatively of his book on Cezanne, his life in London and St Remy de Provence, and his search for an all-embracing critical theory. All his life he had sought official recognition but it was denied him time and time again. Finally, in 1933 he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, but a year later he died.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Roger Fry biography Buy the book at Amazon UK

Roger Fry biography Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Vintage, 2003, pp.314 ISBN: 0099442523

More on Virginia Woolf
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Sigmund Freud – The Ego and the Id

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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

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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

T.S.Eliot – Poems

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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

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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

T.S.Eliot – The Waste Land

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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.

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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

The Bloomsbury Group audio book

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cultural history – voices from the past

The Bloomsbury Group audio book is a collection of archive recordings taken from long-unheard BBC broadcasts and recordings from the Charleston Trust, many of them published here for the first time. They come in a two-CD boxed set, accompanied by a sixteen page explanatory booklet. Contributors to the Virginia Woolf Internet discussion group often comment on how astonishing it is to hear these voices from the past – and how remarkable their accents seem to us now. This is living proof that speech patterns and accents change over time.

The Bloomsbury Group audioRemember that Woolf began writing over a hundred years ago, and her father married Thackeray’s daughter – so these recordings carry with them direct links back as far as the Victorian era. For Bloomsbury Group aficionados and lovers of period nostalgia, this is a rare treat. Secondary Bloomsbury figures throw interesting light on life at that time via their first-hand accounts and memories of each other.

  • Virginia Woolf reading an extract from a radio talk on the importance of language
  • Leonard Woolf proffering a Who’s Who of the Bloomsbury Group
  • Desmond McCarthy meditating on ‘tears’ in literature
  • Duncan Grant discussing the infamous Dreadnought Hoax
  • Clive Bell remembering Lytton Strachey asking, ‘Who would you most like to see coming up the drive?’
  • Frances Partridge speaking about the Group’s larger influence
  • William Plomer discussing the Group’s exclusivity
  • David Garnett candidly describing the relationship between Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington
  • David Cecil detailing Virginia Woolf’s day-to-day appearance
  • Angelica Garnett opining on various attitudes towards members of the Group
  • Harold Nicholson reciting a talk on the members and attitudes that dominated the Group
  • Vita Sackville-West talking about the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
  • Quentin Bell exactingly describing the fashions of Virginia Woolf
  • Benedict Nicholson remembering Virginia Woolf’s visits to Sissinghurst
  • Margery Fry holding court on Virginia Woolf’s flights of fancy
  • Elizabeth Bowen recalling Bloomsbury parties and Virginia Woolf’s antics
  • Ralph Partridge reminiscing on time spent with Leonard and Virginia Woolf
  • John Lehmann describing his reactions to Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts
  • Bertrand Russell on Lytton Strachey and his family
  • Gerald Brenan recalling times spent with Lytton Strachey, Ralph Partridge, and Dora Carrington
  • Grace Higgins describing daily life at Charleston, the Bloomsbury outpost in Sussex

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010

The Bloomsbury Group (Spoken Word), British Library; 2 CD audio set with 16 page booklet, edition (November 15, 2009), Language: English, ISBN: 0712305939

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Twentieth century literature

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

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love, literature, and friendship Bloomsbury-style

The title of this book is letters to Virginia Woolf – but this is so misleading, that I have changed it for the title of this review. This is a fully reciprocated exchange between these two writers – both of letters and affection. And as in many love affairs the power passes from one to the other and back again. Their relationship began in 1923 around the time that Hogarth Press was publishing Vita Sackville-West’s improbably titled novel, Seducers in Ecuador.

Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia WoolfTheir early letters are friendly and flattering, with just a touch of flirtation which gives a hint of Things to Come. But once the deed is done, the flattery is replaced by practical arrangements for meeting up, plus a fear that their secret might have been uncovered by Clive Bell. The amazing thing is that for all the sexual pluralism and bisexuality of the Bloomsbury group, they went to a lot of trouble to preserve the semblance of respectability.

The second phase of the affaire is largely Vita’s travelogue as she journeys to join her husband Harold Nicolson in Tehran where he had been posted to the British Legation by the Foreign Office.

When she gets back to the UK, it’s a good thing we have editorial commentary, because you would not guess from the content of the letters that she had transferred her romantic affection to Dorothy Wellesley, just as later, whilst protesting in every letter how much she missed and was very much in love with Virginia, she was also in love with Mary, wife of South-African poet Roy Campbell – an affair which in true Bloomsbury style, she eventually tells Virginia all about.

There’s no detail of what or how much went on in physical terms between them, but to make up for this there is plenty of intelligent comment on the profession of literature passing between these two women who were after all both commercially successful authors. Virginia asks Vita about the difference between poetry and prose:

I don’t believe there is any, with all due respect to Coleridge … All too often the distinction leads people to think they may mumble inanities which would make them blush if written in good common English, but which they think fit to print if spilt up into lines.

In addition, we get all sorts of quaint period details: Hillaire Belloc buying 2,000 bottles of wine at twopence halfpenny a bottle [for younger readers, that’s one penny in today’s money]; six-day cycle racing in Berlin; Vita cutting down an oak tree for fuel during the General Strike; buying an island in the South Seas for five pounds; and Virginia engaged in the joys of early motoring:

Off for our first drive in the Singer: the bloody thing wouldn’t start. The accelerator died like a duck – starter jammed … At last we had to bicycle in and fetch a man from Lewes. He said it was the magnetos – would you have known that?…

Vita’s letters from Tehran are rich and entertaining, and she is much given to Proustian ‘reflections’:

I have come to the conclusion that solitude is the last refuge of civilised people. It is much more civilised than social intercourse, really, although at first sight the reverse might appear to be the case. Social relations are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together for purposes of defence; a gathering of bushmen or pygmies…

In the middle of all this, both women were writing and publishing at a prodigious rate: Vita’s long award-winning poem The Land and her two travel books, Passenger to Tehran and Twelve Days: Virginia’s Mrs Dalloway, The Common Reader, and To the Lighthouse.

The publication of Orlando made them both famous (“The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you”). Yet despite this, you can sense Virginia’s gradual withdrawal, hurt by Vita’s repeated ‘infidelities’ with other women. In the end, the older, less sexually experienced, and more talented woman retreated into her safer world of the intellect.

They continued to meet and correspond through the 1930s, but the sparkle had gone out of things. Vita moved on to relationships with BBC radio producer Hilda Matheson and others, and Virginia became the love object of pipe-smoking lesbian composer Ethel Smyth.

Despite Vita’s snobbery, her emotional cruelty and hauteur (“the BBC – which I look on as my pocket borough”) in the end I warmed to her sheer exuberance, her energy and inventiveness, her intelligence and creative impulse. This is a wonderfully stimulating record of exchanges between oustanding personalities which has quite rightly become a classic of its kind.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf Buy the book at Amazon UK

Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf Buy the book at Amazon US

Louise de Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp.473, ISBN 1853815055

More on Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

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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

Virginia Woolf – Between the Acts

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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

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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

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