Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury Art: Working together: The Hogarth Press

The Hogarth Press

The Hogarth Press led to collaborations between writers and artists of the Bloomsbury Group. It was set up in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, using a small hand press on the dining table of their home, Hogarth House in Richmond. Its aim was to publish works of contemporary fiction, political comment, economics and psychology that might not appeal to more commercial publishers. The first publication Two Stories, written by Leonard and Virginia, was illustrated by Dora Carrington.

By 1921 the Press, now with more sophisticated mechanical printing equipment, moved to new premises in Tavistock Square. It published books by writers such as Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West as well as Virginia Woolf's novels. It also introduced translations of works of Russian literature by Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others. It was later to publish English translations of books by Sigmund Freud.

Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert: a conversation, with book jacket designed by Vanessa Bell.
Used by permission of the Random House Group Limited

Vanessa Bell collaborated with her sister and brother-in-law designing book jackets and illustrating books. She created the covers for all of Virginia's books except the first, and the first eight covers for a series Living Poets which began in 1928. She was also responsible for the colophon, a wolf's head (a pun on the name of the founders).

The covers of the Hogarth Press books, designed by Vanessa and other artists such as John Banting, William Nicholson and Graham Sutherland, were considered unconventional and modernist but they gave the products of the press a distinctive and unmistakable house style.

Hogarth Press colophon
Used by permission of the Random House Group Limited

One book of particular interest to the Bloomsbury circle was produced as a tribute to Vanessa's son, Julian, who was killed in the Spanish civil war. Julian Bell, Essays, Poems and Letters was published in 1938, edited by his brother Quentin, and included contributions by Maynard Keynes and David Garnett among others.