Virginia Woolf and the World of Books

Book excerpt: Just over hundred years ago, in 1917, Leonard and Virginia Woolf began a publishing house from their dining-room table. This volume marks the centenary of that auspicious beginning. Inspired by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's radical innovations as independent publishers, the volume celebrates the Hogarth Press as a key intervention in modernist and women's writing and demonstrates its importance to independent publishing and bookselling in the long twentieth century. Building on work shared at the 27th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference held at the University of Reading in June 2017, the contributors discuss what Leonard Woolf called "The World of Books" in his long-running column on all sorts of book matters in the weekly periodical the Nation and Athenaeum. Topics include archives, craftsmanship, artwork, libraries, collecting, reading, publishing, translation, reception, re-visions, editing, and teaching. The essays collected here foreground the growing interventions of book and material history in Woolf studies and together provide a timely contribution to debates about independent publishing in our own rapidly-shifting world of books.