Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press

Status	Owned by Random House
Founded	1917
Founder	Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf
Successor	Chatto & Windus
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Headquarters location	London
Publication types	Books

Blue plaque

The Hogarth Press was a British publishing house founded in 1917 by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books.

During the interwar period, the Hogarth Press grew from a hobby of the Woolfs to a business when they began using commercial printers. In 1938 Virginia Woolf relinquished her interest in the business and it was then run as a partnership by Leonard Woolf and John Lehmann until 1946, when it became an associate company of Chatto & Windus. "Hogarth" is now an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, part of Random House Inc.

As well as publishing the works of the members of the Bloomsbury group, the Hogarth Press was at the forefront of publishing works on psychoanalysis and translations of foreign, especially Russian, works.

History

Printing was a hobby for the Woolfs, and it provided a diversion for Virginia when writing became too stressful. The couple bought a handpress in 1917 for £19 (equivalent to about £900 in 2012) and taught themselves how to use it. The press was set up in the dining room of Hogarth House, where the Woolfs lived, lending its name to the publishing company they founded. In July they published their first text, a book with one story written by Leonard and the other written by Virginia.^[1]

Between 1917 and 1946 the Press published 527 titles.^[2]

Number of publications by year from 1917 to 1946[3]
Year	1917	1918	1919	1920	1921	1922	1923	1924	1925	1926	1927	1928	1929	1930	1931	1932	1933	1934	1935	1936	1937	1938	1939	1940	1941	1942	1943	1944	1945	1946
Titles published	1	2	5	3	6	9	14	14	28	31	42	30	30	30	34	36	20	21	24	23	20	17	23	12	13	12	7	10	4	4

Profit generated by the Hogarth Press publication (without bonuses and salaries)[4]
Year	1917–18	1919	1920	1921	1922	1923	1924	1925	1926	1927	1928	1929	1930	1931	1932	1933	1934	1935	1936	1937	1938
Profit	£13 8s 8d	£13 14s 2d	£68 19s 4d	£25 5s 6d	£10 6s 4d	£5 7s 8d	£3 17s 0d	£73 1s 1.5d	£26 19s 1d	£64 2s 0d	£380 16s 0d	£580 14s 8d	£2,373 4s 2.5d	£2,209 0s 1.5d	£1,693 4s 1d	£929 15s 2.5d	£516 13s 0d	£598 7s 2d	£84 5s 0d	£2,422 18s 5d	£35 7s 7d

Notable title history

• Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf, with woodcuts by Vanessa Bell
• The Devils (1922) by Dostoyevsky – translated by Virginia Woolf herself
• Karn (1922) and Martha Wish-You-Ill (1926) – poetry by Ruth Manning-Sanders
• The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1924) – first UK book edition
• In a Province (1934) – first book by Laurens van der Post
• The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1956–1974), in collaboration with Anna Freud
• The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977) by Jacques Lacan, his first published Seminar.

References

1. Gaither 1986, pp. xx–xxi
2. Gaither 1986, p. xviii
3. Woolmer 1986
4. Willis 1992, 406

Bibliography

• Gaither, Mary E. "The Hogarth Press 1917–1946" pp. xvii–xxxiv in J. Howard Woolmer (1986), A checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946, Woolmer Brotherson Ltd. ISBN 0-906795-38-9.
• Willis, J. H. (1992), Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917–41, University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-1361-6.
• Woolmer, J. Howard "Publications of The Hogarth Press" pp. 3–178 in J. Howard Woolmer (1986), A checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946, Woolmer Brotherson Ltd. ISBN 0-906795-38-9.

Further reading

• J. Howard Woolmer, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917–1938 (1976) [With a short history of the press by Mary E. Gaither] Woolmer/Brotherson, 1986, 250 p.: ISBN 0-913506-17-6 (compare Hogarth Press Publications, 1917–1946 at Duke University Library that uses the numbering of the Woolmer publication)
• George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (1977. London: J. Cape.) Harvest/HBJ paperback ISBN 0-15-657299-0
• Richard Kennedy, A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972. Whittington Press.) Hesperus Press Ltd ISBN 978-184391-461-7

External links

• "Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the detective novel" (PDF), essay by Diane F. Gillespie in the South Carolina Review, volume 35.2 (Spring 2003).
• A detailed account of the Hogarth Press at the Yale Modernism Lab
• The Bloomsbury Group and Hogarth Press Collection at the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto which features all the Hogarth Press books hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf including many variant issues, bindings and proof copies. (Records for each item can be found in the University of Toronto Library Catalogue.)