Virginia Woolf & the World of Books

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.

Nicola Wilson is lecturer in book and publishing studies at the University of Reading. Her first book is 'Home in British Working-Class Fiction' (2015) and her current project is 'Books by Mail: The Story of the Book Society, 1929-69'. She has written various articles and chapters about the archives of the Hogarth Press and is a co-author of 'Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project' (2017).

Claire Battershill is a Government of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Impact Award Winner in the Talent Category for 2017. She is the author of 'Circus' (McClelland & Stewart, 2014); 'Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press' (Bloomsbury, 2018); co-author (with Helen Southworth, Alice Staveley, Michael Widner, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, and Nicola Wilson) of 'Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities' (Palgrave, 2017); and co-author (with Shawna Ross) of 'Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom' (Bloomsbury, 2017).