Posted in 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Cecil Woolf, Cecil Woolf Publishers, Hogarth Press, Hogarth Press centenary, Virginia Woolf, tagged 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Cecil Woolf, Cecil Woolf Publishers, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf on Thursday 29 June 2017| 8 Comments »
After decades of publishing other people’s books, Cecil Woolf has written a monograph of his own. Cecil Woolf: The Other Boy at the Hogarth Press, Virginia and Leonard Woolf as I Remember Them is being launched at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virgina Woolf in Reading, England this week.
To order this monograph and others in the Bloomsbury Heritage and War Poets series, visit Cecil Woolf Publishers.
Posted in 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, events, Hogarth Press, Hogarth Press centenary, tagged Hogarth Press archives, Hogarth Press Centennial, Leonard Woolf, University of Reading Special Collections, Virginia Woolf on Wednesday 28 June 2017| 2 Comments »
Sometimes things last longer than one would like. Other times, they fly by and seem much too short. My tour of the archives at the University of Reading Special Collections, part of the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, fell into the latter category.
The tour of the archives focused on the collection of documents related to the Hogarth Press founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917. We weren’t permitted to take photos, so I’ll describe what I saw.
The Hogarth Press documents nearly filled two stacks. Most of the 18 shelves contained boxes of documents — from letters to notebooks detailing the book income of the authors they published. Nearly three of the long shelves were filled with large leather-bound ledger books from the press. I wanted to linger and explore by hand but we had to move on.
Our next stop was an exhibition housed at the same location, which is also the Museum of English Rural Life. The Hogarth Press at 100 marks the importance of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s venture into independent publishing and book selling. It will be on display through Aug. 31.
The exhibition features contemporary artwork responding to a conference call for printed works. It includes original artwork, woodblocks, archival objects and documents from the archives of the Hogarth Press, held in the University of Reading’s Special Collections.
On the bottom shelf in one glass display case were two special items: nearly matching leather satchels, worn and creased with cracks, that belonged to the Woolfs. Virginia and Leonard carried them during their travels. And attached to Virginia’s was a faded blue tag leftover from a trip to France.
Because of copyright issues, we were not permitted to take photos, so I am longing for a website or a print catalogue that will share the items and art displayed.
Walking to the Museum of Rural English Life, which houses the Hogarth Press archive, as well as the Hogarth Press at 100 exhibition.
Museum of English Rural Life
Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press at 100
Whoops! I snapped this photo at the beginning of the exhibition before I saw the sign instructing us not to take photos.
Posted in Hogarth Press, Hogarth Press centenary, The Mark on the Wall, tagged Hogarth Press, Hogarth Press Centennial, Leonard Woolf, Mine Özyurt Kılıç, The Mark on the Wall, Virginia Woolf on Wednesday 26 April 2017| 1 Comment »
Editor’s Note: This essay, written in March of this year, was contributed by Mine Özyurt Kılıç, a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and co-organizer of Harvard’s May 10 event, A Press of One’s Own: Celebrating 100 Years of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. At Harvard, she currently investigates the connection between the ethical and aesthetic components of short fiction. Her research mostly focuses on contemporary British fiction with special interest in women’s writing. She is the author of the first book-length study on Maggie Gee’s fiction — Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel (Bloomsbury 2013). This academic celebration brings her back to her master’s thesis on the theme of failure in love in T. S. Eliot’s poetry as well as to her lectures on British Modernism.
The snail is a seal of the Hogarth Press, a signature of its focus on nature and the natural against the industrialized literary marketplace! Like this snail with its home on its back, The Hogarth married private and public life with a letterpress machine on a dining table. And that has made all the difference!
The snail that makes its appearance on the first publication of the Hogarth Press, “The Mark on the
This first Woolf story they publish can also be read as a fictional manifestation of Woolf’s ars poetica. The narrator first situates herself in the world understanding one truth about it– “what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in” — then discerns her calling in it:
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.
This quiet, calm, spacious, and uninterrupted mode of deep thinking is the very engine behind Woolf’s Modernist texts that require a different mode of reading, a deliberately slow and effortful one that is like the movements of a crawling snail. The central motif in the story, also visually reproduced in Dora Carrington’s woodcut print to accompany the text, the snail is one of the many lives that the narrator feels committed to describe in detail.
[…] there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately.
In a later Woolf story “Kew Gardens” (1919), the snail now becomes one of the central consciousnesses. A single figure among those visitors coming from different walks of life, it makes its way around the flowerbed, thinking whether it is better to move or not, drawing the reader’s attention to the minutiae of everyday life, to a moment of being, from a major to a minor key. As such, it becomes a sign of a special state of consciousness slow enough to attend to details, to the cotton wool of daily life, to moments of being, to epiphanies, to fragments shored against ruins, to marks on walls, flowers, images and smells that memory brings from distant times and places.
In the idiom of Woolf’s snail, the early Hogarth draws its readers’ attention to an eccentric, marginal and extraordinary vision that necessitates a reading slow enough to digest and savor millions of surrounding lives.
Posted in events, Hogarth Press, Hogarth Press centenary, tagged Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Richmond, Virginia Woolf on Thursday 8 December 2016| Leave a Comment »
I wish I’d remembered to post this information earlier, but there are still a few days remaining to visit
You’ll find it at the Riverside Gallery, Old Town Hall, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond, TW9 1TP.
Held in conjunction with the Richmond Literature Festival, the exhibit celebrates a century since Virginia and Leonard Woolf began publishing in Richmond under the auspices of their small publishing house started in 1917, the Hogarth Press.
The press gave Leonard and Virginia the opportunity to self-publish and provided an important opportunity for writers and artists to showcase their work uncensored and in small print runs.
Posted in 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, Hogarth Press centenary, tagged 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, University of Reading, Virginia Woolf on Thursday 1 September 2016| 1 Comment »
Call for papers: “Virginia Woolf and the World of Books” invites you to consider the past, present and future of Virginia Woolf’s works. Attendees are invited to submit papers relating to all aspects of the Woolfs, the world of books, and print cultures, including topics related to Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press; the production, reception and distribution of Woolf’s works; editing, revision and translation; periodicals and book publishing; Woolf and her readers; global and planetary modernisms; Bloomsbury and its networks; Hogarth Press authors and illustrators; modernist publishing houses and publishers; Woolf and the Digital Humanities.
Abstracts: Abstracts should be between 200-250 words. Submissions should include a cover note with brief biography, affiliation, and contact details including email.
Abstract deadline: Abstracts are due Feb. 1, 2017. Send to to vwoolf2017@gmail.com.
For more information: Visit the conference website. Please direct any enquiries to vwoolf2017@gmail.com.
Conference rates: Day rates and reduced rates for students and the non-waged will be available.
