She hugged the blanket to her chest and made her way back towards the lights of the house.

THE HOGARTH PRESS:
100 years on

The Hogarth Press moved from Richmond, to the basement of 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, in 1924. By then, as Leonard Woolf later boasted, they already published ‘a remarkable constellation of stars’. The Woolfs employed a small staff, and no longer relied entirely on private subscriptions, depending increasingly on ‘travellers’ who delivered advance copies to interested booksellers across the country. The Press took on the International Psycho-Analytical Library, thus becoming the English-language publishers of Sigmund Freud. There were unusual poetry titles and works in translation, and several influential pamphlet series, including the Hogarth Letters, which covered topics ranging from politics and social issues to aesthetics.

Hogarth’s bestsellers included Vita Sackville West’s The Edwardians (1930) and Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933) – told from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog – both of which received prominent endorsement from The Book Society, the leading book club of the day. Virginia Woolf’s fame grew; Man Ray even photographed her for the cover of Time magazine in 1937. As Leonard later put it, her books were the ‘rock upon which […] the economic fortunes of the Hogarth Press were profitably based’. Collaboration with her artist sister, Vanessa Bell, gave Virginia’s books a distinctive image, the dustjacket for each novel featuring a flower in Bell’s free and distinctive style.

Leonard’s careful approach to overheads kept the Press on the straight and narrow. Assistants continued to be overworked, facilities basic (rats were reported). John Lehmann, one assistant who stayed the course, later became part-owner with Leonard, enabling Virginia to withdraw as a partner in 1938. By then the Press had published some 440 books. After 52 Tavistock Square took a direct bomb hit in 1940, Lehmann oversaw the relocation of the Press, which for a time was based outside London at its regular printers in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire.

It was John Lehmann who brought his influential magazine New Writing to the Hogarth list, and who published Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). He was keen to expand the business; the increasingly weary Leonard was not. In 1946, Woolf was able to buy out Lehmann with funds from Chatto & Windus, who took on the day-to-day management of the Press, publishing authors such as George Mackay Brown, Henry Green and Laurie Lee. Leonard Woolf died in 1969, but the Press continued and a Bloomsbury revival saw definitive editions of Virginia Woolf’s works produced, and multi-volume series of Diaries, Letters and Essays begun.

In 1984, under publisher Carmen Callil, Hogarth Paperbacks was launched, an eclectic list of purple-spined paperbacks; and in 1990, a new non-fiction hardback line was started. In 2012 Hogarth went transatlantic, with an adventurous fiction list commissioned both from London and New York. A new series, Hogarth Shakespeare, invites contemporary novelists to reimagine their favourite plays.