The Hogarth Press was a British publishing house founded in 1917 by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books. During the interwar period, the Hogarth Press grew from a hobby of the Woolfs to a business when they began using commercial printers. 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. As well as publishing the works of the members of the Bloomsbury group, the Hogarth Press was at the forefront of publishing works on psychoanalysis and translations of foreign, especially Russian, works. In 2011, Chatto & Windus, then owned by Random House, relaunched Hogarth in partnership with Crown Publishing Group, an American sister division of Random House.
History
Printing was 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. Between 1917 and 1946 the Press published 527 titles. Hogarth Press has begun producing a series of modern retellings of William Shakespeare plays, for which it has hired a variety of authors:
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 Vanessa Bell. 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.
