The early titles, often handmade, were seldom beautiful. As Leonard later put it, the Woolfs weren’t interested in making finely produced books ‘which are not meant to be read’; plain printing and simple design were sufficient. In the 1920s and 30s, cover art by Vanessa Bell and others created a new mood, but in 1917 the urgent thing was to master the craft, and decide what to print.

There was much shared curiosity in acquiring a press. The Woolfs had moved into Hogarth House in 1915, and their early time there had been dominated by Virginia’s recovery from mental breakdown. Leonard was exempt from military call-up owing to hand tremors, and his wife’s illness. But as her health improved, the house became a place of possibility. And Leonard too was seeking diversion from the pressures of his work for the Fabian Society and the New Statesman.

Virginia had been taught book-binding in her teens. In 1916 she and Leonard had attempted to sign up for classes at St Bride’s School of Printing, but discovered these were for unionised apprentices and not middle-class dilettantes. But they struck lucky in March the following year, as Leonard recalled:

We were walking one afternoon up Farringdon Street from Fleet Street to Holborn Viaduct when we passed the Excelsior Printing Supply Co. […] Nearly all the implements of printing are materially attractive and we stared through the window at them rather like two hungry children gazing at buns and cakes in a baker shop window.

A century on, the building that housed Excelsior is a down-at-heel Tandoori restaurant. Then, ‘a very sympathetic man in a brown overall […] extremely encouraging’ listened to the Woolfs’ dilemma. Perhaps he saw them coming: for £19 5s 5d he sold them ‘a printing machine, type, chases, cases, and all the necessary implements’ including ‘a sixteen page pamphlet which would infallibly teach us how to print.’

On delivery, the machine turned out to have been broken in transit, and the Woolfs had to wait for a spare part. No matter, Virginia explained to her sister: ‘the arrangement of the type is such a business that we shant be ready to start printing directly.’ They were scouting for material from young poets and novelists but it wasn’t yet clear what exactly they would be printing. Anyway, the Caslon Foundry type had arrived in ‘great blocks’ and Virginia’s first task was to divide this into ‘separate letters, and founts, and then put into the right partitions. The work of ages, especially when you mix the h’s with the ns, as I did yesterday.’

The machine having been fixed, Leonard’s job was to operate it. It sat on the dining-room table, ‘an ordinary platen design; you worked it by pulling down the handle which brought the platen and paper up against the type in its chase.’ Virginia’s typesetting was an intricate and all-consuming job: using a composing stick to arrange and order each letter (in reverse and upside down), then adding spacing blocks between words and lines, all to exact measurements. Once a full page was ready, it was ‘locked up’ in the metal frame of the ‘chase’; Leonard would ink the rollers and machine ‘a fairly legible page’.