Hogarth Press

About Hogarth Press

The Hogarth Press is a British publishing house founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth House, their home in Richmond, and it survives as an imprint of Penguin Random House.

The Woolfs bought a hand press in 1917 and set it up in their dining room. Their first publication, Two Stories (July 1917), paired one story by each of them with illustrations by Dora Carrington. The press issued the first British book edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1923), and in March 1924 it moved with the Woolfs to 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. By the late 1920s it was using commercial printers.

Hogarth published Virginia Woolf's own novels from Jacob's Room (1922) onwards, with jackets by Vanessa Bell, as well as Vita Sackville-West's bestseller The Edwardians (1930). It became the English-language publisher of Sigmund Freud through the International Psycho-Analytical Library, culminating in the Standard Edition of his works (1956 to 1974).

Virginia Woolf gave up her share in 1938, and Leonard ran the press with John Lehmann. After Lehmann left, Hogarth became associated with Chatto & Windus, and through Chatto it passed into Random House and then Penguin Random House. The name has since been used for a contemporary fiction list and for the Hogarth Shakespeare series of retellings begun in 2015.

How to spot a Hogarth Press first edition

• Hogarth Press first editions carry no first edition statement. Second and later impressions or editions are identified on the title page, the verso, or both, so a copy with no later-impression note is the one to look for.