The heroine of my historical mysteries, Julia Kydd, boasts a slight acquaintance with the great modernist writer Virginia Woolf. In Relative Fortunes, we learn that she persuaded Woolf to let her publish her four-page single-sentence essay titled “Wednesday.” Julia then designed, typeset, printed, and bound the small chapbook herself to inaugurate her private Capriole Press. Julia, her book, and her imprint are fictional, but the passion for creating a private press of one’s own was absolutely real in the 1920s.
In fact, Virginia Woolf shared Julia’s enthusiasm. In 1917 she and her husband Leonard bought a small hand-operated printing press, some fonts of type, and other basic equipment to set up a rudimentary printing studio. They named the enterprise the Hogarth Press, as it occupied the dining room of Hogarth House, their home outside London. As they were both writers, they wanted the freedom to publish what and as they liked, unhampered by commercial publishers’ need for profits or their gatekeeping judgments about what was “obscene” or “unreadable.”
More importantly, they hoped the venture would give Virginia an absorbing handcraft to focus her mind and protect her ever-fragile mental health. It worked. She soon marveled at the work’s absorbing power to “devour one’s entire life.” She found the need for dexterous care and the rhythmic solitude of manual typesetting “exciting, soothing, ennobling, and satisfying.” As one who’s spent countless hours composing type by hand and overseeing students similarly hunched over type cases, I can only agree.
The Woolfs produced several small editions from 1917 on, mostly of their own work and that of others in their Bloomsbury circle. Most significant was the 1923 Hogarth Press edition of their friend T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the poem’s first U. K. appearance in book form. Typesetting poetry poses particular challenges, and Virginia struggled to compose Eliot’s fragmented lines. But she managed creditably, and one of the 450 copies of that first edition is worth thousands of dollars today.
Unlike Julia, Virginia Woolf did not aspire to the fine printing standards embodied by the great private presses at the turn of the twentieth century: Kelmscott, Doves, Ashendene, and others. The earliest Hogarth books, at left, were crudely executed, but they bore a quaint charm of rough design and simple oil-marbled paper wrappers. Later, illustrations by Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell and others livened up the productions with robust colorful designs (below).
Virginia was above all a writer. While the close, repetitive labor of setting type and preparing formes to print were a tonic for her troubled mind, her literary work came first. The Woolfs hired staff to keep up with their publishing plans, and the Hogarth Press steadily grew far beyond a therapeutic hobby. It became a mainstream literary imprint and was eventually subsumed into Chatto & Windus, itself an affiliate division of Random House. For a time, though, the dining room printshop that was the Hogarth Press had sheltered and sustained one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century.
Seventy-nine years ago today, on March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and waded into the River Ouse behind her country home in East Sussex. She assured Leonard of the “greatest possible happiness” he had given her, but feared she was again descending into the madness she had battled all her life. The world lost a literary giant that day, but Woolf found release from her torment. May she continue to rest, at last, in peace.
Top photo: Virginia Woolf in 1927, unknown photographer
We’ve made pilgrimages to the typesetting machine at the British Library and to the back path from Monk’s House to the River Ouse. Reading Woolf changed my life.
I’ve never been to Monk’s House, alas. The closest I’ve come is Stephanie Barron’s intriguing what-if historical novel The White Garden (set in large part at Sissinghurst). Definitely worth a read, formerly 20C literary/history buffs like us.