Virginia Woolf – Jacob’s Room

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Jacob's Room - 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