Among other intriguing rare finds, Jon S. Richardson Rare Books is offering a previously unknown version of Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Mark on the Wall” in French.
“The piece is accompanied by a short essay on Woolf’s breakthrough style and a review of her novels through her short story collection Monday or Tuesday by one P.C. [presumably Paul Colin, one of the editors).”
The catalogue explains that “this translation is not noted in Kirkpatrick, it is three years earlier than the earliest known appearance of Woolf in the French language” and there is “no mention in Leonard’s autobiography of this translation or Mende.”
More about the volume
As for the volume’s condition, the “book is bright, solid and VG for age with minor wear from age and soil, unusual to be in this condition because paper has acidified slightly.” The price is $275.
Jon and Margaret Richardson are not newcomers to the world of Woolf. They have made hunting down the works of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group their mission since opening York Harbor Books in Maine more than 25 years ago.
The Richardson duo put out a list of “Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group” offerings quarterly. They issued their previous list in the summer.
More French connections to Woolf’s “Mark on the Wall”
For more on the French connections to Woolf’s “Mark on the Wall,” read Blogging Woolf’s post from Oct. 20, 2010, “The French connection to ‘The Mark on the Wall.'” It explores similarities, parallels, and differences between Woolf’s short story and novels by Marguerite Dumas and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
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.
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.
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.
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).
What: A one-day conference on Virginia Woolf and Her Early Short Stories that incorporates the general meeting of theVirginia 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.’
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.
