Hogarth Press
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond (then in Surrey and now in London), where they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period. Hogarth originally published the works of many members of the Bloomsbury Group, and was at the forefront of publishing works on psychoanalysis and translations of foreign works, especially Russian.
Hogarth Press

Photo taken by Mark Barker. · MaxHund · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Founded
- 1917.
- Headquarters
- Richmond.
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Documentary summary
The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond (then in Surrey and now in London), where they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period. Hogarth originally published the works of many members of the Bloomsbury Group, and was at the forefront of publishing works on psychoanalysis and translations of foreign works, especially Russian.
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Hogarth Press was founded in 1917, with headquarters in Richmond. It is associated with Bloomsbury Group.
Composed from admitted, traceable facts · 29 September 2026
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In this article
History
History
In 1938, Virginia Woolf relinquished her interest in the business and it was then run as a partnership by Leonard Woolf and John Lehmann until 1946, when it became an associate company of Chatto & Windus. In 2011, Hogarth Press was relaunched as an imprint for contemporary fiction in a partnership between Chatto & Windus in the United Kingdom and Crown Publishing Group in the United States, which had both been acquired by Random House.
Printing began as a hobby for the Woolfs, and it provided a diversion for Virginia when writing became too stressful. The couple bought a handpress in 1917 for £19 (equivalent to about £1295 in 2018) and taught themselves how to use it. The press was set up in the dining-room of Hogarth House, where the Woolfs lived, lending its name to the publishing company they founded. In July 1917, they published their first text, Two Stories, a book with one story written by Leonard and another written by Virginia. From these origins as a "little press", by the late 1920s the Hogarth Press had become a larger operation, using commercial printers and distributing to an international readership, with some of its bestsellers printed in the tens of thousands. Between 1917 and 1946, the Press published 527 titles. It moved to Tavistock Square in 1924.
Series
Series
The Hogarth Press produced a number of publication series that were affordable as well as being attractively bound and printed, and usually commissioned from well known authors. These include the initial Hogarth Essays in three series 1924–1947 (36 titles), Hogarth Lectures on Literature (2 series 1927–1951), Merttens Lectures on War and Peace (8 titles 1927–1936), Hogarth Living Poets (29 titles 1928–1937), Day to Day Pamphlets (1930–1939), Hogarth Letters (12 titles 1931–1933) and World-Makers and World-Shakers (4 titles 1937). The Essays were the first series produced by the press and include works by Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Virginia Woolf's defence of modernism, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), was the initial publication in the series. Cover illustrations were by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell. Bell also designed book jackets for all of Woolf's books that were published by Hogarth Press. The Letters are less well known, and are epistolary in form. Authors include E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Woolf's A Letter to a Young Poet (1932) was number 8, and was addressed to John Lehmann as an exposition on modern poetry. Cover illustrations were by John Banting. In 1933, the entire series was reissued as a single volume, and is available on the Internet Archive in a 1986 edition. A letter to Madam Blanchard, E. M. Forster (1931) A letter to an M.P. on disarmament, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1931) A letter to a sister, Rosamond Lehmann (1931) The French pictures: a letter to Harriet, Robert Mortimer and John Banting (1932) A letter from a black sheep, Francis Birrell (1932) A letter to W. B. Yeats, L. A. G. Strong (1932) A letter to a grandfather, Rebecca West (1933) A letter to a young poet, Virginia Woolf (1932) A letter to a modern novelist, Hugh Walpole (1932) A letter to an archbishop, J. C. Hardwick (1932) A letter to Adolf Hitler, Louis Golding (1932) A letter to Mrs. Virginia Woolf, Peter Quennell (1932)
Notable title history
Notable title history
Paris: A Poem (1920) by Hope Mirrlees Twelve Original Woodcuts (1921), a portfolio by Roger Fry hand-printed by the Woolfs. Monday or Tuesday (1921) by Virginia Woolf, with woodcuts by Vanessa Bell Jacob's Room (1922) by Virginia Woolf; the first of her novels published by The Hogarth Press The Devils (1922) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – co-translated by Virginia Woolf The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1923) – first UK book edition The Common Reader (1925) by Virginia Woolf Karn (1922) and Martha Wish-You-Ill (1926) – poetry by Ruth Manning-Sanders Orlando (1928) by Virginia Woolf Living (1929) by Henry Green A Room of One's Own (1930) by Virginia Woolf The Waves (1931) by Virginia Woolf In a Province (1934) – first book by Laurens van der Post What I Believe (1939) by E. M. Forster Party Going (1939) by Henry Green Twilight in Delhi (1940) by Ahmed Ali Loving by Henry Green (1945) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1956–1974), in collaboration with Anna Freud The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977) by Jacques Lacan, his first published Seminar.
The Hogarth Shakespeare Project
The Hogarth Shakespeare Project
In 2015, Hogarth Press began producing a series of modern retellings of William Shakespeare plays, known as the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, for which it hired a variety of authors: The Gap of Time (based on The Winter's Tale), Jeanette Winterson (published 2015) Shylock is my Name (based on The Merchant of Venice), Howard Jacobson (published 2016) Vinegar Girl (based on The Taming of the Shrew), Anne Tyler (published 2016) Hag-Seed (based on The Tempest), Margaret Atwood (published 2016) New Boy (based on Othello), Tracy Chevalier (published 2017) Dunbar (based on King Lear), Edward St Aubyn (published 2017) Macbeth (based on Macbeth), Jo Nesbo (published 2018)
Institutional history
Dated record
Institutional history
Explore 1917–1946
The full dated record · 3 entries
1917
Hogarth Press established.
1917
Hogarth Press is recorded from 1917.
1946
Hogarth Press ceased.
Primary material
Documents and archives
authority file
- Gemeinsame Normdatei 200210-3, Hogarth Press (London).
General reference · Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
reference work
- “Hogarth Press”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
authority record
- Wikidata, structured authority record Q1623362: Hogarth Press
General reference · Wikidata
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Gillespie, Diane F. Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the detective novel. South Carolina Review. 35. 2. Spring 2003.
- 2.Hogarth. Penguin Books.
- 3.Andriani, Lynn. Random Creates Hogarth, a U.S.-U.K. Imprint. PublishersWeekly.com. 11 April 2011.
- 4.Heyes, Duncan. The Hogarth Press. British Library. 25 May 2016.
- 5.Bank of England. Inflation calculator.
- 6.Gaither 1986, pp. xx–xxi.
- 7.Battershill, Claire. Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. Bloomsbury Academic. 9. 2019. 9781350134232.
- 8.The Hogarth Press. Modernist Archives Publishing Project.
- 9.Gaither 1986, p. xviii.
- 10.Woolmer 1986.
- 11.Willis 1992, 406.
- 12.Obermair, Hannes. Italienischer Faschismus und deutschsprachiger Katholizismus. Königshausen & Neumann. 137–62 (140). 2013. 978-3-8260-5058-9.
- 13.Catlin, Roger. A sister's bookish art for her sister, Virginia's, publishing company, the Hogarth Press. Washington Post. 15 May 2015.
- 14.Paris by Hope Mirrlees. British Library Collection items.
Bibliography printed in the source article · 13
- University of Delaware Library. Hogarth Press: The Series. Special Collections Department. 2010.
- Gaither, Mary E. "The Hogarth Press 1917–1946" pp. xvii–xxxiv in J. Howard Woolmer (1986), A checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946, Woolmer Brotherson Ltd. .
- Jaillant, Lise. Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde. Edinburgh University Press. 120–139. 2017.
- Jaillant, Lise. Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde. Edinburgh University Press. 17 April 2017. 978-1-4744-1724-2.
- Kennedy, Richard. A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972. Whittington Press), Hesperus Press Ltd.
- Lee. The Hogarth Letters. University of Georgia Press. 1986.
- Edinburgh University Press. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. 2012. 978-0-7486-6921-9.
- Spater, George; Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (1977. London: Jonathan Cape). Harvest/HBJ paperback.
- Willis, J. H. (1992), Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917–41, University Press of Virginia. .
- Woolf, Virginia. A Letter to a Young Poet. Hogarth Press. 8. 1932.
- Hogarth Press. The Hogarth Letters. 1933.
- Woolmer, J. Howard. "Publications of The Hogarth Press" pp. 3–178 in J. Howard Woolmer (1986), A checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917–1946, Woolmer Brotherson Ltd. .
- Woolmer, J. Howard. A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917–1938 (1976) [With a short history of the press by Mary E. Gaither] Woolmer/Brotherson, 1986, 250 p.: (compare Hogarth Press Publications, 1917–1946 at Duke University Library that uses the numbering of the Woolmer publication)
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
authority file
Gemeinsame Normdatei 200210-3, Hogarth Press (London).Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Secondary witnessreference work
Secondary witnessauthority record
General reference
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 14 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Publishers and printers
5,459 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
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