Hogarth Press

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hogarth Press began with a handpress that cost nineteen pounds. Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf bought it in 1917, set it up in the dining room of their home in Richmond, and taught themselves to print. That first summer, they produced a single book: Two Stories, with one story by Leonard and one by Virginia. Nobody could have guessed that a hobby purchased for less than the cost of a modest piece of furniture would grow into one of the most consequential publishing ventures in twentieth-century Britain. How did a kitchen-table operation become the publisher of T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and a generation of writers who reshaped modern literature? And what happened when Virginia Woolf stepped away from the enterprise she had helped to build?

• 2. A Dining Room Press

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  Hogarth House stood in Richmond, then in Surrey, and it gave the press its name. The printing began as a deliberate counterweight to literary work. When writing became too stressful for Virginia, setting type by hand offered a different kind of concentration. The couple's handpress occupied their dining room, and from that modest arrangement they published their first text in July 1917. By 1920, the press was putting out three titles a year. By 1926, that figure had risen to thirty-one. The scale of the shift is visible in the profit figures: in 1917-18, the press cleared just over thirteen pounds. By 1929, that number had climbed to more than five hundred and eighty pounds. Within a decade of that first nineteen-pound investment, the Hogarth Press had moved from the dining room to Tavistock Square, and its bestsellers were being printed in the tens of thousands.

• 3. The Bloomsbury Connection

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  Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell designed the cover illustrations for the Hogarth Essays series, and she created book jackets for all of Virginia's books that the press published. That family collaboration points to something broader: the Hogarth Press was deeply embedded in the network of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group. Roger Fry, the art critic and painter who was central to that circle, had a portfolio of twelve original woodcuts hand-printed by the Woolfs in 1921. The press published Virginia Woolf's Monday or Tuesday that same year, with woodcuts again by Vanessa Bell. Jacob's Room arrived in 1922, the first of Virginia's novels the press brought out under its own name. The Common Reader followed in 1925, then Orlando in 1928, then A Room of One's Own in 1930, and The Waves in 1931. The press was not simply a vehicle for one writer; it was the primary home for Virginia Woolf's entire literary output during the most productive years of her career.

• 4. Publishing the Avant-Garde

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  T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land appeared as its first UK book edition in 1923, published by Hogarth. That single title tells much about the press's appetite for work that commercial publishers hesitated over. The Hogarth Press was also at the forefront of bringing psychoanalytic writing to English readers. Its most sustained commitment in that field culminated in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, produced in collaboration with Anna Freud across nearly two decades from 1956 to 1974. The press published Hope Mirrlees's Paris: A Poem in 1920, Henry Green's Living in 1929, Laurens van der Post's first book In a Province in 1934, and Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi in 1940. Alongside English-language work, it placed a particular emphasis on Russian literature in translation, and co-translated Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Devils with Virginia Woolf's involvement in 1922. Jacques Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, his first published Seminar, appeared under the Hogarth imprint in 1977.

• 5. Series, Pamphlets, Letters

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  Virginia Woolf's Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, her defence of modernism published in 1924, was the opening title in the Hogarth Essays series, which eventually ran to thirty-six titles across three series from 1924 to 1947. The press used its series format to make distinguished work affordable and attractive. The Hogarth Living Poets series ran from 1928 to 1937 and included twenty-nine titles. The Day to Day Pamphlets ran from 1930 to 1939. The Hogarth Letters, twelve titles published between 1931 and 1933, took an epistolary form and drew contributions from E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, Rebecca West, and Louis Golding, among others. Woolf's own contribution, A Letter to a Young Poet from 1932, was addressed to John Lehmann and offered an exposition on modern poetry. In 1933, the full Hogarth Letters series was reissued as a single volume. The Merttens Lectures on War and Peace ran to eight titles between 1927 and 1936, while the Hogarth Lectures on Literature stretched across two series from 1927 to 1951.

• 6. After Virginia Woolf

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  In 1938, Virginia Woolf gave up her interest in the press. From that point, Leonard Woolf ran it as a partnership with John Lehmann, whom Virginia had addressed in her 1932 letter on modern poetry. Between 1917 and 1946, the press published 527 titles in total. In 1946, the independent company became an associate of Chatto and Windus. The press continued to publish under that arrangement, including the long Freud Standard Edition project that stretched into the 1970s. In 2011, Hogarth Press was relaunched as an imprint for contemporary fiction through a partnership between Chatto and Windus in the United Kingdom and Crown Publishing Group in the United States; both firms had by then been acquired by Random House. The relaunch brought a new ambition in 2015, when Hogarth Press began commissioning a series of modern retellings of Shakespeare plays. Authors recruited for the Hogarth Shakespeare Project included Margaret Atwood, who retold The Tempest as Hag-Seed in 2016, and Jo Nesbo, whose version of Macbeth appeared in 2018.