Two Stories
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.
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’.
Then the solution became clear. They would each write a story, print the pair as a paper-covered pamphlet and sell by subscription to their circle of friends. As if writing and printing weren’t enough, the Woolfs now had to get down to the business of selling. Their first published work was in fact an advertisement, which Virginia sent to Lady Ottoline Morrell in May 1917: ‘We find we have only 50 friends in the world – and most of them stingy. Could you think of any generous people – they need not be very generous – whose names you would send me?’
The advertisement, an amateur endeavour, in which even the price is wrong (the pamphlet was actually sold for 1s 6d), nonetheless showed their ambition: the words ‘Publication No. 1’ also appeared prominently on the title page of Two Stories, as it was finally named. The two short stories were Leonard’s ‘Three Jews’ and Virginia’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’.
Orders started to arrive, and Virginia was busy setting Leonard’s story; ‘I haven’t produced mine yet,’ she told her sister. ‘It was a casual mark of the utmost significance,’ observes Virginia’s biographer, Hermione Lee:
For Leonard, the story was a signpost pointing down a road he would not take as a fiction writer, as a Jewish writer. But for Virginia it ‘marked’, as her title suggests, a completely new direction, the beginning of a new form and a new kind of writing.
The language of the title page was also unusual, being ‘written and printed by Virginia Woolf and L.S. Woolf’. The composition of sentences, via the creative flow of fiction and their setting in individual Foundry letters, were inextricably linked. As Lee remarks, ‘the new machine had created the possibility for the new story’.
By July, the texts were finally printed. Dora Carrington travelled to Hogarth House to deliver four commissioned woodcuts in person. Virginia thanked her: ‘Will you let us know what your expenses (including fare, and one halfpenny newspaper) come to, so that your pittance may be doled out to you.’ The Woolfs had tremendous difficulties printing the woodcuts – the blocks were too high and left smudged surrounds – but the images lent a lively, bold Omega style to the pamphlet.
The red and white Japanese paper covers were similarly arresting. The thread for binding, also a vivid red, was stab-stitched and knotted by Virginia. The red knot continues to be a powerful draw for those seeking a physical connection with her.
The print run of 134 copies (which nonetheless required over 4000 pulls on the printer on Leonard’s part) sold out quickly, even when they raised the price of the last few copies to 2s. Receipts came to £10 8s with a net profit of £7 1s once costs of paper and ink and Carrington’s fee of 15s were deducted. Leonard in particular took great pride and delight in the healthy figures. Almost immediately the Woolfs were looking for a larger printing machine, and an apprentice.
If fiction was not to be Leonard’s ultimate direction, seven years as an administrator in Ceylon had taught him much about office management and meticulous accounting. His networks in politics and journalism, his honed commissioning instincts and excellent business sense, enabled him to steer a profitable course for the Press.
Virginia was inspired by her readers’ reactions. ‘I’m very glad you liked the story,’ she replied to David Garnett:
In a way its easier to do a short thing, all in one flight than a novel. Novels are frightfully clumsy and overpowering of course; still if one could only get hold of them it would be superb. I daresay one ought to invent a completely new form.
She had made her ‘mark’ – with a new and distinctive voice – and her story augured a change in her writing. It was ‘very amusing to try with these short things,’ she continued ‘and the greatest mercy to be able to do what one likes – no editors, or publishers, and only people to read who more or less like that sort of thing.’
This was said through gritted teeth, as she would deliver her next novel, Night and Day, to the publishers Duckworth.
But at Hogarth House, with its green-carpeted dining room, she would also write the stories of Monday or Tuesday, the novel Jacob’s Room, and embark on Mrs Dalloway. It was important that she and Leonard published these titles themselves, albeit now using out-of-house printers for longer books with substantial print runs. Not only did they expand the list to include many writers which, according to Leonard, ‘the commercial publisher would not look at,’ they also made room for their in-house writer Virginia. They had created a ‘strange offspring’, but it was a Press they could call their own.
CLARA FARMER
Publishing Director
Chatto & Windus and Hogarth
London, April 2017
FURTHER READING
For first-hand accounts, see Leonard Woolf’s autobiographies, Beginning Again (1964) and Downhill All The Way (1967) and Virginia Woolf’s Diaries (ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 1977–84) and Letters (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 1975–80). For a full-length work on the press, see J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: the Hogarth Press 1917–1941 (1992); a bibliography of early publications is provided by J. Howard Woolmer, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946 (1986). For a biographical account, brilliantly contextualizing the Press in the life and work of the Woolfs, see Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996). For illustrations of the books themselves, see Elizabeth Willson Gordon’s beautifully produced Woolf’s-head Publishing: the Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press (2009).
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Two Stories does not appear to have gone through rigorous proofreading; or perhaps the Woolfs deemed the occasional misprint unimportant, once weighed against the job of dismantling the inked type and reworking the ‘chase’ to make a correction.
The text printed here, in a version of the Caslon font they used, follows the 1917 version of ‘The Mark on the Wall’, retaining words and phrases removed from later editions. But this is not intended as a facsimile, and any typos or missed spacings in the original have not been reproduced.
THE MARK ON THE WALL
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it … If that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. She wore a flannel dog collar round her throat, and he drew posters for an oatmeal company, and they wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.