The whole idea appears to have been Leonard’s. It was not prompted by economic necessity; the Woolfs had no dream of making money on the venture. Nor was it conceived as insurance against editorial stupidity; both writers had commercial firms sponsoring their work. Leonard was merely looking for a suitable pastime for his wife, a woman temperamentally unable to relax from her literary labors. “It struck me,” Leonard wrote in his memoir Beginning Again, “that it would be good if Virginia had a manual occupation . . . which, in say the afternoons, would take her mind completely off her work.” It was to that end that he bought her a handpress, a case of 10-point Caslon, and a how-to book for novice printers.
And so the Hogarth Press, destined to become one of the century’s most distinguished and long-lived small publishers, began not even as a hobby, but as a kind of work therapy for an overworked novelist. Its first title, a thirty-four-page booklet called Two Stories, was published in the summer of 1917; it brought together Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall” and Leonard’s “Three Jews” and was printed by the Woolfs, in an edition of 134 copies, on the dining-room table of Hogarth House, their home in Richmond, London. By 1924, when the Woolfs moved to Bloomsbury, the hand- press had been joined by a treadle press, and the Woolfs’ more ambitious projects—Virginia’s novels, for example—were being jobbed out to commercial printers. What had been started for Virginia’s benefit had become Leonard’s obsession, and through that obsession a thriving concern. Indeed, as J. H. Willis, Jr., writes in this, his history of the press’s first quarter-century: “Leonard Woolf’s operation of the press, with his passion for details, his meticulous accounting for every penny, his obvious relish for the minute particulars of all expenditures from stamps and glue to fonts of type, above all his canny budgeting and pricing, surely is as much a distinguishing feature of Hogarth as the presence of a great novelist with composing stick in hand, Virginia Woolf inky and determined.”
Mr. Willis, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary, takes the Hogarth story through 1941, the year of Virginia’s suicide.
Mr. Willis, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary, takes the Hogarth story through 1941, the year of Virginia’s suicide; five years later, Leonard would sell the firm to a larger publisher, Chatto & Windus, which would keep him on as a press director until his death in 1969. This story has been told before, most memorably by John Lehmann, who joined Hogarth as “trainee manager” in 1931 and was Leonard’s full partner at the time of the sale to Chatto. His brief memoir, Thrown to the Woolfs (1978), tells the essential story of Hogarth: what the press meant to the Woolfs, their assistants, and their long list of authors, and what it meant to English literary culture of the Twenties and Thirties. What Mr. Willis adds to the story is detail, a superabundance of it, most of it the result of a recent find in a disused Chatto storeroom: thirty-two grime- covered file boxes of Hogarth records “containing over six hundred separate files on press authors and their books.” His book is a contribution less to literary biography than to business history; here are press runs, sales figures, grosses and nets for some five hundred Hogarth titles. These numbers can be fascinating when they concern such books as T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1918) and The Waste Land (1923); they are much less so when they concern, say, a dozen long-forgotten novels by Vita Sackville-West. If the book is often genuinely valuable, as when it sets Hogarth in the context of the era’s bustling small-press scene, outlines Hogarth’s program in translations from the Russian, or tells how the Woolfs became the U.K. publisher of Freud, it is also often wooden, repetitious, even downright boring: it wants to be an annotated checklist, not a continuous narrative. Specialists in publishing history will find great fun in this sorting-out of old file boxes. Lovers of Bloomsbury, and of portrait-drawing in prose, are advised to stick with Thrown to the Woolfs.