The Hogarth Press

Home - Books - Reviews - Tutorials - Software - Download - Orders - Newsletter

Subscribe here for our free email newsletter	Custom Search
<< WRITING ESSAYS << LEONARD WOOLF << BLOOMSBURY GROUP The Hogarth Press historical notes - page one 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, 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. 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. Many 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 - Page Two The Bloomsbury Group
Home - Books - Reviews - Tutorials - Software - Download - Orders - Newsletter

historical notes - page one