Hogarth Press


The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.
Hogarth originally published the works of many members of the Bloomsbury Group, and was at the forefront of publishing works on psychoanalysis and translations of foreign, especially Russian, works.
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. In 2011, Hogarth Press was relaunched as an imprint for contemporary fiction in a partnership between Chatto & Windus in the United Kingdom and Crown Publishing Group in the United States, which had both been acquired by Random House.

History

Printing began as 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 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.
From these origins as a 'little press', by the late 1920s the Hogarth Press had become a larger operation, using commercial printers and distributing to an international readership, with some of its bestsellers printed in the tens of thousands.
Between 1917 and 1946 the Press published 527 titles. It moved to Tavistock Square in 1924.

Series

The Hogarth Press produced a number of publication series that were affordable as well as being attractively bound and printed, and usually commissioned from well known authors. These include the initial Hogarth Essays in three series 1924–1947,
Hogarth Lectures on Literature, Merttens Lectures on War and Peace, Hogarth Living Poets, Day to Day Pamphlets, Hogarth Letters and World-Makers and World-Shakers.
The Essays were the first series produced by the press and include works by Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Virginia Woolf's defence of modernism, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown was the initial publication in the series. Cover illustrations were by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. Bell also designed book jackets for all of Woolf’s books that were published by Hogarth Press.
The Letters are less well known, and are epistolary in form. Authors include E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Woolf's A Letter to a Young Poet, was number 8, and addressed to John Lehmann as an exposition on modern poetry. Cover illustrations were by John Banting. In 1933, the entire series was reissued as a single volume, and are available on the Internet Archive in a 1986 edition.
  1. A letter to Madam Blanchard, E. M. Forster
  2. A letter to an M.P. on disarmament, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
  3. A letter to a sister, Rosamond Lehmann
  4. The French pictures: a letter to Harriet, Robert Mortimer and John Banting
  5. A letter from a black sheep, Francis Birrell
  6. A letter to W. B. Yeats, L. A. G. Strong
  7. A letter to a grandfather, Rebecca West
  8. A letter to a young poet, Virginia Woolf
  9. A letter to a modern novelist, Hugh Walpole
  10. A letter to an archbishop, J. C. Hardwick
  11. A letter to Adolf Hitler, Louis Golding
  12. A letter to Mrs. Virginia Woolf, Peter Quennell

    Notable title history

  • Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees
  • Twelve Original Woodcuts a portfolio by Roger Fry hand-printed by the Woolfs.
  • Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf, with woodcuts by Vanessa Bell
  • Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf; the first of her novels published by The Hogarth Press
  • The Devils by Dostoyevsky – co-translated by Virginia Woolf
  • The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot – first UK book edition
  • The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf
  • Karn and Martha Wish-You-Ill – poetry by Ruth Manning-Sanders
  • Orlando by Virginia Woolf
  • Living by Henry Green
  • A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
  • The Waves by Virginia Woolf
  • In a Province – first book by Laurens van der Post
  • What I Believe by E. M. Forster
  • Party Going by Henry Green
  • Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali
  • Loving by Henry Green
  • The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, in collaboration with Anna Freud
  • The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan, his first published Seminar.

    The Hogarth Shakespeare Project

In 2015 Hogarth Press began producing a series of modern retellings of William Shakespeare plays, known as the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, for which it hired a variety of authors:
  1. The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson
  2. Shylock is my Name, Howard Jacobson
  3. Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler
  4. Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood
  5. New Boy, Tracy Chevalier
  6. Dunbar, Edward St Aubyn
  7. Macbeth, Jo Nesbo