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Norwegian multidisciplinary artist Ane Thon Knutsen is at it again — at combining Virginia Woolf and the letterpress, that is.

This time, the Oslo Academy of the Arts professor has debuted her installation, “Printed Words: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf,” at University Archives and Special Collections at the Florida Gulf Coast University library.

The Feb. 23 opening reception introduced the installation, which will be on display from now through the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf:
Virginia  Woolf and Ecologies, June 8-11. Registration opens in March.

In “Printed Works,” the self-taught typesetter who has exhibited other letterpress projects and installations related to Woolf, adapts a selection of Virginia Woolf’s self-published short stories.

“Knutsen’s artistic research aims to point out the influence typography, particularly typesetting, might have on the content of the text. It speaks to the power of designing and publishing one’s own work,” notes the FGCU Special Collections and Archives website.

Her first Woolf project: a book

In “A Printing Press of One’s Own,” which premiered at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf” at the University of Reading, England, in 2017, Ane produced a hand-set volume that includes Ane’s personal essay about her experience finding a space of her own in which she could pursue her passion — typesetting.

Ane Thon Knutsen with her hand-printed volume introduced at the 2017 Woolf conference, “A Printing Press of One’s Own”

According to Ane, “The book is an essay referring to A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf. The essay reflects upon women’s role in letterpress, and the importance of a room of one’s own in artistic practices.

“In this book I am investigating the first books printed by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, both in practice and in the written ‘dialogue’ between Virginia Woolf and myself, as we are both self-taught typesetters.”

Her second: up on the walls

In the winter of 2019, Ane had a major installation of Woolf’s first short story, “The Mark on the Wall,” (1917) in Kunstnernes Hus, an art institution in the centre of Oslo.

As described by Nell Toemen, who visited the exhibit and shared her thoughts with Blogging Woolf, Woolf’s story was “handprinted on I don’t know how many papers, white and off-white, neatly arranged so as to fill all the walls. If you would walk the room in eleven rounds you would be able to read the whole story. Reading it this way is an absolutely different experience than reading the story in a book.”

Page 2 of the “On Being Ill” project

Her third: via Instagram

In March of 2020, as lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe, Ane used her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from “On Being Ill,“ Woolf’s 1930 essay.

She shared each page on Instagram and she shared her thoughts about the project with Blogging Woolf.

At the time, she said she was using her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from “On Being Ill” “until we can go back to normal. I hope I will not make it through, as we’re counting about 140 sentences, and the paper is restricted to leftovers from my stock.”

About Ane Thon Knutsen

Ane is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts has won numerous awards for her work. She owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.

 

 

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Is it today? Or was it yesterday? The date of the centenary anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s short story collection Monday or Tuesday is under debate, the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain admits.

Roundtable participants at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in 2017 sit below a screen showing a digitized ledger sheet from the Hogarth Press.

The society celebrated the centenary with an email message to members and a post on its Facebook page that included mention of the date disparity, background about the book, and a list of the stories in the 1921 volume, the only collection of Woolf’s short fiction published in her lifetime.

Short stories in Monday or Tuesday

  • A Haunted House
  • A Society
  • Monday or Tuesday
  • An Unwritten Novel
  • The String Quartet
  • Blue & Green
  • Kew Gardens
  • The Mark on the Wall

About the book

Leonard and Virginia handset the type for Monday or Tuesday, which was the first of Woolf’s hardback books published by the Hogarth Press.

Vanessa Bell created the cover art, as well as the four woodcuts that appear inside the Hogarth Press edition.

Art and content aside, in Beginning Again, Leonard described it as “one of the worst printed books ever published, certainly the worst ever published by The Hogarth Press” (239).

Modernist Archives Publishing Project

The digital collection of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, which officially debuted at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, includes Leonard’s order book. In his meticulous fashion, it details the names of people who bought copies of the original volume.

Photos courtesy of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project

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What: A one-day conference on Virginia Woolf and Her Early Short Stories that incorporates the general meeting of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
When: Saturday, 4th April 2020, 10:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Registration begins at 10 a.m.
Where: Oriental Club, First Floor, 11 Stratford Place, London WIC IES. Opposite Bond Street tube.
Cost: £35 for members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and students; £38 for non-members. Lunch and refreshments are included.

Tickets: For tickets, contact Sarah Latham Phillips at latham_phillips@yahoo.com

Availability: Space is limited to 55 and this event is already half-booked.

Speakers

  • Dr. Sue Roe, Writer, Biographer & Woolf scholar: ‘Reflections on Kew Gardens – and Blue and Green; and the Waves.”
  • Professor Frances Spalding, Emeritus Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge: ‘Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Mark on the Wall.’
  • Sarah Latham Phillips MA, Freelance Lecturer: ‘The influence of the Visual Arts on the early short stories of Virginia Woolf.’

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I bought my first collection of Virginia Woolf’s short fiction in Brighton as an undergraduate on a study trip to “Bloomsbury in Sussex” (Charleston, Monks House, the river Ouse). Its cover, a detail from the painting Synthesis of the Supper Room at an Arts Club Reception by the Scottish post-impressionist Stanley Cursiter, patchworks together people and coffee cups, giving a sense of immediacy, of the fleeting moment, of lived experience. This depiction of the experience of consciousness, as Woolf put it in her essay “Modern Fiction,” the intention to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind,” is also what draws me back to her short fiction.

Read the entire essay on the website of Open Letters Monthly: An Arts and Literature Review.

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Where I live, we are lucky to have Nightlight Cinema, a small locally-owned theatre that shows independent films ignored by the big theater complexes that feature blockbusters.

Drawn in by a preview of A Ghost Story, I attended Nightlight’s last showing of the film on Thursday. I was glad I did. Why? Two reasons. It was intriguing. And it pays tribute to Virginia Woolf.

The film, which has received rave reviews, includes the first line of Woolf’s short story “A Haunted House” in the opening credits. It is shown for a few moments on a dark background.

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.

Filmmaker David Lowery’s use of the quote was a clue to what I didn’t know but soon learned — that Woolf is one of his favorite authors and her 1921 story helped inspire his film.

My investigation also uncovered the fact that when the ghost knocks several books off a shelf, the open book upon which the camera focuses includes important lines from “A Haunted House,” lines about treasure, buried treasure, “the light in the heart.”

Woolf as guiding light

Orlando is one of my favourite novels,” Lowery told the Irish Times. “I love her letters too. She’s my guiding light. The way she uses time fascinates me. Especially in To the Lighthouse and Orlando. They play with time in this dynamic and fun way. I love the idea of a character existing outside of time in the way that Orlando does.

“So that was certainly on my mind when I was writing the screenplay. And I wanted to pay homage to her in some small regard. And I wondered if she had ever written about ghosts. So I did a Google search. And found A Haunted House. I couldn’t believe that I had never read it before.

“The first sentence begins: ‘Whatever hour you woke there was a door shunting’. [sic] I couldn’t resist extending that to the film. I hope that it encourages somebody somewhere to pick up her work. Because I owe a lot to her.”

Playing with time as Woolf does

The film is a story of a house and its haunting, much like Woolf’s story. And it kept me thinking about its meaning and the message of the film long after I exited the theater, just as Woolf’s writing does long after I finish one of her novels or stories.

What’s more, Lowery plays with time in the film, much as Woolf does. As he noted in an interview with Huffington Post: “Virginia Woolf’s literature really transformed my own ideas about how to formally represent the passage of time and how time affects us. Specifically, the benchmarks are Mrs. DallowayTo the Lighthouse and Orlando, all of which have time as a central conceit.”

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