Ben Majchrowicz at Charleston’s new exhibit, “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press,” which runs through Sept. 9.
When I messaged Ben Majchrowicz last week, asking him for details about “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press“ the new exhibit at Charleston in Firle, he was in the middle of the installation process. But true to form, he sent me everything he promised before the exhibition opened April 1.
Co-curated by Ben and Stephen Barkway, along with Charleston’s exhibition team, the exhibition is a major one. Running through Sept. 9 and created in partnership with the Gordon Square Society, Antwerp, it brings together for the first time the most complete collection to date of hand-printed books produced by the Hogarth Press.
While many know of Virginia’s role as a writer, and her husband Leonard ’s roles as a writer, editor, and Labour Party committee member, this new exhibit shows their pivotal roles as printers, publishers, and makers.
Multiple copies of Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”
The exhibition includes works loaned from several major private collections across Europe, including Ben’s.
It features more than 100 rare books alongside archival material, letters, and artworks. It also positions the Hogarth Press as a literary enterprise as well as a radical, handmade practice at the heart of British modernism, according to a Charleston media release.
According to Ben, one of the difficulties of putting the exhibit together was making choices. The co-curators had to decide which of multiple copies of Virginia’s Kew Gardens, R.C. Trevelyan’s Poems and Fables, and Fredegond Shove’s Daybreak they should include.
The press and the table it sat on
The Hogarth Press table at the home of the late Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson in June 2019. ©Paula Maggio
Founded as an independent printing venture in 1917 in the Woolfs’ own home, Hogarth House in Richmond, the press originally sat on the Woolf’s dining room table.
Later, when a larger Minerva platen printing press was purchased in 1921, it moved to the basement. And when the Woolf’s moved to 52 Tavistock Square, London, in 1924, the press made its home in the basement again.
The Minerva platen printing press is now housed at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, Kent. And the dining table on which it sat is in the London kitchen of the late Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson and has seen many dinner guests over the years.
The Hogarth Press and its writers
The Woolfs hand-set and printed many of their early works including their first book publication, Two Stories (1917) by the couple, Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (1918), and T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919).
Besides publishing the work of members of the Bloomsbury group, the Hogarth Press also published a diverse list of international writers, including 29 translations from Russian, German, and Italian between the two world wars.
According to the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, the press deliberately pushed to reshape the publishing landscape of interwar Britain, producing seminal texts. These included works by Nancy Cunard, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, the colonial novels of William Plomer and Laurens van der Post, and the English translations of Sigmund Freud.
As part of its literary history, the Hogarth Press championed a wide selection of otherwise popular, middlebrow writers, educational and political tracts, children’s literature, and medical and self-help manuals. In the 1930s it published many titles, including these: Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930), William Plomer’s The Case is Altered (1932) and Virginia Woolf’s own Flush (1933).
The Hogarth Press also served as a diversion for Virginia. As Leonard put it in Beginning Again, the third volume of his autobiography:
It struck me that it would be a good thing if Virginia had a manual occupation of this kind which, in say the afternoons, would take her mind completely off her work . . . we definitely decided that we would learn the art of printing. (Beginning Again, 233)
About “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press”
Five different covers of Fredegond Shove’s Daybreak
Bringing together hand-printed books, illustrated editions and works conceived through close collaboration between writers and artists, the exhibition reframes publishing as a creative practice shaped by intimacy, courage and control over one’s own voice.
The exhibition includes first editions of key modernist texts published by the Hogarth Press, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hope Miralees’ Paris. These classics, appear alongside lesser-known works and books of original visual prints that demonstrate the press’s commitment to new voices, ideas and creativity.
Displayed together, these books reveal the Hogarth Press as a place where literary innovation, political thought and artistic experimentation converged.
Six cover versions of “Poems and Fables” by R.C. Trevelyan
As handmade objects, the books bear the visible traces of their making: one-of-a-kind covers, typographical errors and inky fingerprints. These material details are central to the exhibition, emphasizing publishing as a form of iterative creative practice rather than industrial production.
The exhibition also highlights the contributions of Bloomsbury artists including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, whose designs for book covers and illustrations helped craft the Hogarth Press’ distinctive visual identity. These collaborations underscore the close relationship between literature, art and design within the Bloomsbury group, and Charleston’s role as a centre for this interdisciplinary creative community.
Publications of the Hogarth Press blurred boundaries between art, craft and literature, treating the book itself as an art object.
About the co-curators
Ben Majchrowicz is co-founder of the Gordon Square Society, Belgium. Last November and December, he held a world premiere exhibition, sponsored by the Gordon Square Society, called “Letter by Letter (From the Woolfs’ Hands): Handprinted Books by Virginia & Leonard Woolf.” For the first time in Belgium, the public exhibition brought together all 34 books hand-set, printed, bound and published in limited editions by Virginia and Leonard Woolf themselves under their Hogarth Press imprint. These rarities came from Ben’s collection, as well as that of Pierre and Marie-Madeleine Coumans.
Stephen Barkway is co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. Along with Stuart N. Clarke, he collected and edited a massive volume of The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf, which was published last year. He co-edits and regularly contributes to the Virginia Woolf Bulletin.
Co-curators Ben Majchrowiczand and Stephen Barkaway at the Charleston exhibit “Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press
Publicity graphic distributed before the exhibition opened April 1. It runs through Sept. 9.
The Minerva platen printing press used by the Woolfs to publish volumes for the Hogarth Press at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, Kent, in June 2004. ©Paula Maggio
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