Hogarth Press

Authors' collectives are not a new thing.

One thinks of the Bloomsbury Group or the Hogarth Press or any number of authors who've come together with a common goal...

Have you a sense of attachment to any of those collectives which have gone before you? Or is the idea of the authors' collective now to be obviously forward-looking, but fresh and new and different?

That's a very good question.

And I love the fact that she did it with her husband, which is what I'm doing with mine.

And so to me, that felt very special that the Hogarth Press that they set up together and that they used to publish her books, as well as other people who excited them in that little area.

So I love that.

I always kind of go and try and kind of suck it up by osmosis and also give my thanks to them for the courage that they they had at that time to do that.

In 1917, they bought a small hand-operated printing press.

What began as a shared occupation became the Hogarth Press, named after their home.

Printing involved setting individual pieces of type, checking proofs, producing pages, and binding the finished copies.

For Virginia, words were now physical objects as well as vehicles for thought.

The uncertainty was deliberate.

Readers had to participate in assembling a life while recognizing that some parts would remain inaccessible.

The Hogarth Press also became an important outlet for other innovative writing, publishing T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in book form in nineteen twenty-three.

Virginia and Leonard were participating in a wider transformation of literature, even as her own voice became increasingly recognizable.

Oh, that makes sense.

With artists like Francis Cugat or Vanessa Bell, who designed the striking modernist jackets for Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, the wrapper transformed from literal trash into a vital piece of modern art and marketing.

And we see that with Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room on the list going for $125,000, and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon at 136,000.

In both cases, the seller specifically emphasizes the presence of an unrestored dust wrapper.