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Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press
Hogarth House, 34 Paradise Road, Richmond, London
Parent companyPenguin Random House
StatusAcquired
Founded1917
FounderLeonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf
Defunct1946 
SuccessorChatto & Windus and Crown Publishing Group
Country of originUnited Kingdom
Headquarters locationLondon
Publication typesBooks
Official websitewww.randomhousebooks.com/imprint/hogarth-books/ (United States)
www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/vintage/hogarth.html (United Kingdom)
Blue plaque

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 (then in Surrey and now in London), 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,[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]

History

Printing began as a hobby for the Woolfs, and it provided a diversion for Virginia when writing became too stressful.[4] The couple bought a handpress in 1917 for £19 (equivalent to about £1295 in 2018)[5] 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.[6]

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. [7][8]

Between 1917 and 1946 the Press published 527 titles.[9] It moved to Tavistock Square in 1924.[10][4]

Sales and profitability
Number of publications by year from 1917 to 1946[11]
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)[12]
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

Series

The frontispiece of a publication from 1929 with Hogarth's official logo portraying the head of a wolf[13]

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 (36 titles), Hogarth Lectures on Literature (2 series 1927–1951), Merttens Lectures on War and Peace (8 titles 1927–1936), Hogarth Living Poets (29 titles 1928–1937), Day to Day Pamphlets (1930–1939), Hogarth Letters (12 titles 1931–1933) and World-Makers and World-Shakers (4 titles 1937).[14]

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 (1924) 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.[15][14]

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 (1932), was number 8, and addressed to John Lehmann as an exposition on modern poetry. Cover illustrations were by John Banting.[16][14] In 1933, the entire series was reissued as a single volume,[17] and are available on the Internet Archive in a 1986 edition.[18]

  1. A letter to Madam Blanchard, E. M. Forster (1931)
  2. A letter to an M.P. on disarmament, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1931)
  3. A letter to a sister, Rosamond Lehmann (1931)
  4. The French pictures: a letter to Harriet, Robert Mortimer and John Banting (1932)
  5. A letter from a black sheep, Francis Birrell (1932)
  6. A letter to W. B. Yeats, L. A. G. Strong (1932)
  7. A letter to a grandfather, Rebecca West (1933)
  8. A letter to a young poet, Virginia Woolf (1932)
  9. A letter to a modern novelist, Hugh Walpole (1932)
  10. A letter to an archbishop, J. C. Hardwick (1932)
  11. A letter to Adolf Hitler, Louis Golding (1932)
  12. A letter to Mrs. Virginia Woolf, Peter Quennell (1932)

Notable title history

See also: Category:Hogarth Press books

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 (based on The Winter's Tale), Jeanette Winterson (published 2015)
  2. Shylock is my Name (based on The Merchant of Venice), Howard Jacobson (published 2016)
  3. Vinegar Girl (based on The Taming of the Shrew), Anne Tyler (published 2016)
  4. Hag-Seed (based on The Tempest), Margaret Atwood (published 2016)
  5. New Boy (based on Othello), Tracy Chevalier (published 2017)
  6. Dunbar (based on King Lear), Edward St Aubyn (published 2017)
  7. Macbeth (based on Macbeth), Jo Nesbo (published 2018)

References

  1. ^ Gillespie, Diane F. (Spring 2003), "Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the detective novel" (PDF), South Carolina Review, 35 (2), archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2016
  2. ^ "Hogarth". Penguin Books. Retrieved 15 November 2020.
  3. ^ "Random Creates Hogarth, a U.S.-U.K. Imprint". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 29 November 2019.
  4. ^ a b Heyes, Duncan (25 May 2016). "The Hogarth Press". British Library. Archived from the original on 27 March 2017. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  5. ^ "Inflation calculator". Bank of England.
  6. ^ Gaither 1986, pp. xx–xxi.
  7. ^ Battershill, Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press 2018, p. 9
  8. ^ "The Hogarth Press". Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Retrieved 15 December 2024.
  9. ^ Gaither 1986, p. xviii.
  10. ^ Southworth 2012.
  11. ^ Woolmer 1986.
  12. ^ Willis 1992, 406.
  13. ^ Obermair, Hannes (2013), "Danger Zones – der englische Historiker John Sturge Stephens (1891–1954), der italienische Faschismus und Südtirol", in Faber, Richard (ed.), Italienischer Faschismus und deutschsprachiger Katholizismus, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 137–62 (140), ISBN 978-3-8260-5058-9
  14. ^ a b c Delaware2010.
  15. ^ Catlin, Roger. "A sister's bookish art for her sister, Virginia's, publishing company, the Hogarth Press". Washington Post.
  16. ^ Woolf 1932.
  17. ^ Woolf & Woolf 1933.
  18. ^ Lee 1986.
  19. ^ "Paris by Hope Mirrlees". British Library Collection items. Retrieved 27 August 2023.

Bibliography

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