Hogarth Press
The publishing house The Hogarth Press was founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf . He became one of the most important British publishers of fiction .
The Publisher
The name goes back to their house in Richmond , in whose dining room they first set the books by hand and then also printed them by hand on a Minerva platen printing press they had bought second- hand. In July 1917, production began with the delivery of Two Stories , a 34-page booklet each containing a story of the spouses, The Mark on the Wall of Virginia and Three Jews by Leonard Woolf. In the interwar years, the hobby became a company whose books were produced by commercial printers. In the very first four years, the Woolfs TS discovered Eliot . In 1938 Virginia Woolf sold her shares in the publishing house to her former editor, the writer John Lehmann , but continued to work on the program. The publishing house was run in a partnership between Leonard Woolf and John Lehmann until 1946. After that it was a sub-company of Chatto & Windus .
The program
In addition to the works of the Bloomsbury Group , such as Virginia Woolf's own works and those of John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry , Hogarth Press published the collected works of Sigmund Freud and contemporary writers such as John Betjeman , EMForster , Robert von Ranke-Graves , Christopher Isherwood , Katherine Mansfield , Harold Nicolson , Gertrude Stein , Vita Sackville-West , Hugh Walpole , HG Wells and Rebecca West . Translations of foreign, especially Russian, literature with authors such as Maxim Gorky , Anton Chekhov , Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have also appeared . The continent was represented by Italo Svevo's novels and poems by Rainer Maria Rilke .
Virginia Woolf was the publisher's editor , Leonard the merchant, who showed a great need for security. In addition to the successfully published authors, there were also some misjudgments. He rejected works by Jean-Paul Sartre , WH Auden and Saul Bellow , for example . Hogarth Press have often claimed Ulysses by James Joyce rejected, but Leonard Woolf tried, but to find a printer that does not succeed.
Examples from the publishing program were:
- EMForster: The Story of the Siren - Short Story (1920)
- Leonard Woolf: Stories of the East - Kurzgeschichten (1921) - hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, cover by Dora Carrington
- Virginia Woolf: Jacob's Room - novel (1922) - first novel Virginia Woolfs printed by Hogarth Press
- TS Eliot: The Waste Land (1923) - first British edition
- John Maynard Keynes: A Short View of Russia - Essays (1928)
- Virginia Woolf: Orlando - Biography - (1928)
- Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own (1929)
- Laurens van der Post : In a Province (1934) - first book by the author
- Henry Green : Loving (1945)
Hogarth House and later publishing addresses
The house was built in 1750 and was first named Suffield House in 1851 . In 1870 it was renovated and divided into house numbers 1 and 2. Suffield House, number 2, was called Hogarth House from 1910 , five years before the Woolfs moved in. After Virginia's first attempt at suicide, they were looking for a quiet place away from London, but close enough to get to the city quickly. Virginia fell in love with the house immediately, but after another collapse Leonard had to move in alone on March 25, 1915. Later a cook and a maid joined them. During air raids during the First World War , the residents fled into the basement. In 1922 TS Eliot read here in front of a group of friends from his new work Das wüsten Land .
Virginia later grew tired of the loneliness of Hogarth House and longed for closer contact with the Bloomsbury group again. Even so, she fondly remembered the days there in her diary. The move to the new house at 52 Tavistock Square in London took place on March 13, 1924. The publishing house found its place in the basement. The former billiard room became Virginia Woolf's study and also served as a paper and book store.
In August 1939, the Hogarth Press moved to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. In September of the next year, the house was badly damaged by an air raid . The Woolfs outsourced the publishing house to Letchworth Garden City and relocated to their summer home Monk's House in Rodmell, Sussex .
The old platen press from the early days of the Hogarth Press is on display in the tower of Sissinghurst Castle , the last residence of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.
In 1934, of all things, the British Union of Fascists moved their headquarters to Hogarth House for a year . Today a company resides there that has made a name for itself in the renovation of the property. The address is now 34, Paradise Road.
literature
- Leonard Woolf: My life with Virginia. Memories . 6th edition, Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl., Frankfurt am Main 2003 (= Fischer-Taschenbücher; 5686), ISBN 3-596-25686-0 . (German; ed. by Friederike Groth) (Note: The book deals in large part with the development of the Hogarth Press and Leonard Woolf's work as a publisher.)
- J. Howard Woolmer: A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917-38 . The Hogarth Press Ltd. 1976. ISBN 0701204184
- George Spater / Ian Parsons: Portrait of an Unusual Marriage. Virginia and Leonard Woolf . Revised new edition, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2002. ISBN 3-596-13445-5
- Werner Waldmann: Virginia Woolf: with self-testimonies and photo documents . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek, 12th edition 2006, ISBN 3-499-50323-9
Web links
- Directory of the hand-printed works of the Hogarth Press with book cover
- Complete directory of the Hogarth Press from 1917 to 1946
Individual evidence
- ↑ George Spater, Ian Parsons: Portrait of an Unusual Marriage. Virginia & Leonard Woolf . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-596-13445-5 , p. 160