This book 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 and Virginia Woolf used when they first set up the Hogarth Press on a table in their dining room in 1917. 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... Read more >>
22 August 2009
Woolf's-head Publishing
04 March 2009
Virginia Woolf's 'Jacob's Room
Jacob's Room (1922) 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
22 February 2009
Roger Fry - Twelve Original Woodcuts
This is the jacket cover of the first edition, published in 1921 by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. 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
08 February 2009
The Hogarth Press - from hobby to cultural force
I've been looking into the history of the Hogarth Press and marvelling that what started as a therapeutic hobby for Virginia Woolf could grow under the skillful direction of her husband Leonard into a major cultural force which embraced literature, politics, and philosophy. Mind you, it helped that they were friends with some of the most creative intellectuals of the modernist movement at that time.
Most recently I've been annotating a series of pages featuring the original jacket covers from their publications. I'll post some of the more interesting of these here from time to time. Below is a small sample.
full gallery of Hogarth Press book jackets here
27 May 2008
The Letters of Leonard Woolf
Leonard Woolf was one of the longest living (1880-1976) and the most distinguished members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a writer, a publisher, a political activist, a proto environmentalist and animal lover, a loyal friend, cantankerous employer, and a devoted husband.What's not so well known about him is that in fact he had two 'wives' - the second technically married to somebody else - who happened to be his business partner. This definitive selection from his voluminous correspondence begins at Cambridge, with letters to his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey, and fellow apostles G.E.Moore and Saxon Sydney-Turner. The manner of these early writings is surprisingly arch, full of classical references and undergraduate Weltschmerz - though no doubt this reflects the turn-of-the-century social mood amongst such a privileged elite... Read more
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