Two Stories
Contents (10)
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
From Hogarth House: the making of Two Stories
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
The Mark on the Wall
St Brides Bay
The Hogarth Press: 100 years on
List of Illustrations
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. With her husband, Leonard Woolf, she started the Hogarth Press in 1917: the list ranged widely in fiction, poetry, politics and psychoanalysis, and published all Virginia Woolf’s own work.
Its first publication appeared in 2017: Two Stories, bound in bright Japanese paper, contained a short story from both Virginia and Leonard. Typeset and bound by Virginia, with illustrations by Dora Carrington, 134 copies were printed by Leonard using a small handpress installed in the dining room at Hogarth House, Richmond.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of ‘Publication No. 1’ this new edition of Two Stories takes the original text of Virginia’s story, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (with illustrations by Dora Carrington), and pairs it with a new story, ‘St Brides Bay’, by Mark Haddon, a lifelong reader of Virginia Woolf.
Two Stories also includes a portrait of Virginia Woolf by Mark Haddon, and a short introduction from the publisher about the founding of the Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. With her husband, the social reformer Leonard Woolf, she started the Hogarth Press in 1917, which published widely in fiction, poetry, politics and psychoanalysis, as well as publishing all Woolf’s own work.
Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter – and long-term admirer of Virginia Woolf. His worldwide bestseller, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award, and is now a stage play. His most recent book is a short story collection, The Pier Falls. He lives in Oxford.
FROM HOGARTH HOUSE:
the making of Two Stories
Printing fever arrived at Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, in Spring 1917. ‘We get so absorbed we can’t stop; I see that real printing will devour one’s entire life,’ Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister in April 1917. Her husband, Leonard, wished they had never bought the ‘cursed’ hand-press as there was a serious risk he might ‘never do anything else’. The dining room was requisitioned for the machine. The couple were consumed and delighted by their new interest. Their hands were permanently stained with ink.
‘Nowhere else could we have started the Hogarth Press,’ Virginia wrote as they left Richmond for Bloomsbury in 1924, ‘whose very awkward beginning had risen in this very room, on this very green carpet. Here that strange offspring grew & throve; it ousted us from the dining room […] & crept all over the house’. By then, with forty books published – twenty hand-printed by the Woolfs themselves, including Prelude by Katherine Mansfield and Poems by T.S. Eliot – the ‘strange offspring’ stood on sturdy legs. The Press went on to thrive during the 1930s, and although stricken by Virginia’s death in 1941, Leonard and the Press would find safe harbour at the established publishers Chatto & Windus shortly after the war, where it continues to this day.