“Scraps, orts and fragments”: Collecting Virginia Woolf
By Emily Kopley, 4th year doctoral student in English at Stanford
In Virginia Woolf’s last novel, the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941), a
gramophone plays a cacophonous blend of classical, folk, and popular music to an audience of
English villagers at the beginning of the Second World War. Listening to this chaos, the villagers
wonder “Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that?” They identify
their own motley, confused, and anxious selves with the serial snatches of tunes, and in this
identification find a sense of calm. “They crashed; solved; united,” Woolf writes of the villagers’
communal listening. In To the Lighthouse (1927), the philosophy student Charles Tansley feels
painfully baffled in the home of his professor, his perception “all in scraps and fragments.” Yet
in The Waves (1931), the novelist Bernard thinks, “I begin to long for some little language such
as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”
Woolf’s fiction reveals fragments—of song, of language, of thoughts, of memory—to be the
stuff that life is made on, insufficient splinters when seen from one angle, inviting scraps of a
human-made order, when seen from another.
Woolf’s writing seems to me to have great aesthetic unity, a beauty formed of coherent
patterns that made me fall in love with it when, in high school AP English, my teacher assigned
To the Lighthouse. But the pieces of Woolf’s writing, and the pieces of writing about Woolf,
have little physical unity: Woolf’s work exists in thousands of printings and editions and
translations, The Hogarth Press (1917-1987) published around a thousand books and pamphlets,
the scholarly and biographical and imaginative work on Woolf mounts by several bookshelves
every year, and all these publications lie scattered. When I realized, as an undergraduate, that I
wanted to become a Woolf scholar, I decided to gather the pieces. In collecting work by,
published by, and about Virginia Woolf, I seek to make some unity out of material scraps, orts
and fragments.
Early in college at Yale University, I bought reading copies of Woolf’s novels, none of
them rare, some of them ratty. During the summer after my sophomore year, I purchased my first
unusual Woolf item: a pristine copy of her “A Letter to a Young Poet,” which I discovered in the
Concord, Massachusetts, shop “Books with a Past.” This essay is now a key text in my
dissertation. The pamphlet is one in a
series called The Hogarth Letters, each
cover bearing John Banting’s drawing
of a veiny pen-wielding hand poised
above several sheets of paper. Every
“Letter” features this design in a
different color. After my Concord
conquest, I aimed to own the rainbow.
So far I’ve got a half-arc, heavy on the
blues and greens. The Concord
purchase prompted me to seek more
items published by The Hogarth Press and made me realize that certain rare Woolf items, such as
pamphlets and periodicals, are affordable even on a student budget. I also started collecting The
Hogarth Press’s “Sixpenny Pamphlet” series, as well as first printings of Woolf essays and short
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stories, and whatever first or signed or unusual editions I could obtain. On coffee runs to New
Haven’s Book Trader café, on visits home to central Pennsylvania, on family vacations in New
England, on weekend trips from Yale to New York and Boston, and on procrastinatory
explorations of AbeBooks.com, I sought out my treasures.
A junior year seminar on Woolf, taught by Margaret Homans, confirmed my desire to
study Woolf professionally. The following summer (2005) I traveled for two months in England
on a grant to visit Woolf’s homes and landscapes. I began my trip a proud light packer, with only
one book in my hiker’s backpack: a guidebook about Woolf’s houses. But each house I visited
sold its own guidebook, and bookstores on Woolfian terrain, such as Bow Windows in Lewes,
sold much worth weighing me down. On these travels I also found what is now one of my
favorite pieces: a postcard of Godrevy lighthouse, the inspiration for To the Lighthouse. This I
found at a flea market in St. Ives, the town where Woolf spent childhood summers and the
harbor to which Godrevy guides sailors.
When I returned to Yale, I wrote my senior thesis on structural symmetry in Woolf’s
fiction. My writing inspired my collecting: I bought a first printing of “The Lady in the Looking
Glass” to see the original appearance of a story my thesis considered; I bought a full set of
Woolf’s essays, letters, and diaries to grasp the context around the fiction; I bought scholarly
books, recent and classic and forgotten, to know what had been said. With Yale’s Adrian van
Sinderen Prize, which is similar to the Wreden prize, I bought from William Reese my first
bibliography, J. Howard Woolmer’s A Checklist of The Hogarth Press, 1917-1946. Now I was
serious! A good friend gave me as a graduation present a letterpress broadside that features
passages drawn from a Woolf concordance. And my parents gave me a handsome first British
edition of Between the Acts.
Once in graduate school here at Stanford, I delighted in the Bay Area’s abundance of
bookstores and book fairs. At Serendipity Books in Berkeley I found many Hogarth Press
publications, a letter by Hogarth Press editor John Lehmann,
rare and foreign scholarly volumes, and a nicely heavy and
gilded biography of Leslie Stephen, Woolf’s father, that
includes Woolf’s first publication in a book. At Serendipity,
my pile would start to teeter and I in turn to waver, but Peter
Howard offered a quiet generosity that assured me I could
manage everything. At the San Francisco Book Fair in 2009,
I had the great luck to find, anomalous among the
Americana of MacDonnell Rare Books, The Hogarth Press’s
publication of a translation of Ivan Bunin’s The Gentleman
From San Francisco. “I thought someone here would buy it for the title,” said Kevin
MacDonnell. I’m buying it for the publisher, I explained.
The volume fascinated me – who was S. S. Koteliansky, credited for the translation along
with Leonard Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, neither of whom knew Russian? For a term paper in
Spring 2010, I found out: Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky was a Ukrainian Jew who
immigrated to England before the Russian Revolution and became a devoted friend of Lawrence,
as well as a frequent and idiosyncratic translator for the Hogarth Press. He also translated for the
London Mercury two folk stories his mother had written down for him in Yiddish. I have been
studying Yiddish since I came to Stanford, so this information heightened my interest in “Kot,”
as he was called. I hope someday to turn the term paper into an article.
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Another example of a discovery-turned-research-project: close to home, at Bell’s Books
in Palo Alto, I found a first American edition of the doctoral thesis of George Rylands, who
worked at The Hogarth Press from July to December 1924. The book, Words and Poetry, reveals
Rylands’s sympathy with Woolf’s project of absorbing the rhythms and patterns of poetry into
the novel. Rylands now figures prominently in my dissertation chapter about Woolf’s
relationship to young male poets. Similarly, my mounting John Lehmann material both built on
and bolstered my interest in the Oxford and Cambridge poets of Lehmann’s and Woolf’s circle.
As these examples indicate, collecting Woolf both satisfies and stimulates my research on her.
Stanford has a rich history of Woolf scholarship. The late Lucio Ruotolo, who taught in
the English department, wrote a monograph on interruption in Woolf’s novels, co-founded the
enduring Virginia Woolf Miscellany in 1973, and for decades mentored graduate students who
worked on Woolf. The books of Ruotolo’s students encourage me from their perches on my
shelves. Today, Terry Castle, Peter Stansky, and Alice Staveley continue the tradition of
teaching and studying Woolf at Stanford, and all have been helpful mentors to me. This past
summer I enjoyed helping Peter Stansky prepare an exhibition for the San Francisco Book Club,
“The Birth of Bloomsbury: 1910.” I am now writing my dissertation, under the direction of Terry
Castle, about Woolf’s attitude towards the poetry of her time.
It was not Woolf who first wrote about “scraps, orts and fragments”; Shakespeare used
the words in Troilus and Cressida, when Troilus fumes about Cressida’s unfaithfulness: “The
fractions of her faith, orts of her love, / The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics / Of her
o’er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed” (V.ii.179-181). In Between the Acts, Woolf elevates these
“fragments of . . . faith, orts of . . . love” from the “greasy” parcels representing infidelity to the
profound puzzle pieces that, when assembled, create a feeling of completeness and community—
a feeling, indeed, of faith and love. Gathering scraps, orts and fragments of writing associated
with Woolf testifies to something similar.
Bibliography : an annotated selection of fifty items
Note: This selection does not include certain items mentioned above, including Woolf’s letters,
diaries, essays; the guidebook to her houses; the Woolmer bibliography; and the books written
by Ruotolo and his Stanford advisees.
Rare Woolf editions (In my selection I have focused on work published during Woolf’s lifetime
or soon after her death)
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. New York: Harcourt, 1941. First American edition. VG
boards in VG Vanessa Bell jacket with some fading. NF inside, pages tight. Differs from first
British edition in that cover colored and size larger. Bought at the 2005 AAUW book fair at Penn
State University in State College, PA.
---. Between the Acts. London: The Hogarth Press: 1941. Fine first British edition, with blue
boards lettered in gilt and Fine Vanessa Bell black and white dj. Woolmer 488. 12,958 copies
published in 1941. A present from my parents upon my Yale graduation in Summer 2006. They
bought the book from Jon Richardson of York Harbor Books, ME.
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---. The Captain's Death-Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1950. First American ed.
Fine boards in NF Vanessa Bell jacket with some fading. NF inside, some damage to inside front
cover, pages tight. First American edition. Bought at the 2005 AAUW book fair at Penn State
University in State College, PA. This is one in a series of anthologies Leonard Woolf edited in
order to gather his late wife’s periodical essays into accessible form.
---. Mrs. Dalloway. With a special introduction by the author. New York: Modern Library, 1928.
VG in G dj. Signed thrice by prior owners George and Joan Brewster. Bought at Serendipity
Books in Berkeley, CA, in 2008. Woolf wrote in the introduction:
Of Mrs. Dalloway then one can only bring to light at the moment a few scraps, of little
importance or none perhaps; as that in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to
be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or
perhaps merely to die at the end of the party [ . . . ] The novel was the obvious lodging,
but the novel it seemed was built on the wrong plan. Thus rebuked the idea started as the
oyster starts or the snail to secrete a house for itself. (vii-viii)
---. Ponia Delovéj. Translation of Mrs. Dalloway into Lithuanian by Violeta Tauragiene. Vilnius:
Zaltvyksle, 1994. Bought Summer 2009 at Pigios Knygos (bookstore), Vilnius. Very good hb, no
dj (as apparently issued). Cover image of glamorous 1920s woman in mirror-image over
horizontal. In Summer 2009, I spent a month studying Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.
Every day I walked from a military dorm to campus, passing this book in the window of a used
bookstore. Only at the end of the month did I take a closer look and realize that this was a
Lithuanian Clarissa!
---. The Waves. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931. First American edition. Good
condition: dark green boards, spine faded, missing dj. Given to me in summer 2007 at her State
College home by Jeanne Millholland, the widow of James Millholland, who worked with
Harcourt and Brace and has signed the inside front cover.
---. A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1954. First American edition (British edition 1953). Fine in Fine Vanessa
Bell colored dj. This book consists of diary entries selected and edited by Leonard Woolf. W. H.
Auden affectionately reviewed this book in The New Yorker (“A Consciousness of Reality,” 6
March 1954: 111-116), writinge that “by my own [generation], even in the palmiest days of
social consciousness, she was admired and loved more than she realized.” Auden’s kind words,
along with Lehmann’s and those of other poets not addressed here, suggest that the young 1930s
poets thought more warmly than Woolf’s work than she did of theirs.
Periodicals featuring work by or related to Woolf, ordered chronologically
The Atlantic Monthly. Concord, NH: the Atlantic Monthly Company, Nov. 1927 (Vol. 140, No.
5). Good condition: front cover and spine chipped, cover bears stamp of Granville, OH, Public
Library. Includes first printing of Woolf’s “The Novels of E. M. Forster.” Bought at silent
auction at 19th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, in NYC, June 2009, from the collection of
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Woolf scholar Krystyna Colburn. Auction benefited Girls Write Now, a mentoring program run
from the New School.
Forum: A Magazine of Controversy. Concord, NH: The Forum Publishing Company, Jan. 1928
(Vol. 79, No. 1). Good/VG condition: chipping to cover, inside tight. Includes first printing of
Woolf’s short story “Slater’s Pins Have No Points.” Bought by my father for me at Daedalus
Used Books, Charlottesville, VA, in July 2010.
Harper's Magazine. New York: Harper & Brothers, December 1929 (No. 955). Good/VG
condition: spine half-broken, cover slightly chipped and creased, inside clean and fully intact.
Includes first printing of Woolf's short story “The Lady in the Looking Glass.” Ordered via
AbeBooks in Spring 2006.
The Yale Review. New Haven: Yale UP, June 1932 (Vol. 21, No. 4). Good condition: front cover
chipped, back cover gone, inside clean and intact. Includes first printing of Woolf's “A Letter to
a Young Poet.” This printing has several small variants from the printing in the Hogarth Letters
series.
Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art. London: Horizon, May 1941 (Vol. 3, No. 17). Includes
“Notes on Virginia Woolf” by T. S. Eliot, Rose Macaulay, Vita Sackville-West, and William
Plomer; reminiscences after Woolf’s death. VG condition. Bought at Harvard Book Store on
12/27/10.
Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art. London: Horizon, June 1941 (Vol. 3, No. 18). Includes
“Virginia Woolf,” by Duncan Grant, a memorial essay. VG condition. Bought at silent auction at
19th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, in NYC, June 2009, from the collection of Woolf
scholar Krystyna Colburn. Auction benefited Girls Write Now, a mentoring program run from
the New School.
Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art. London: Horizon, July 1942 (Vol. 6, No. 31). Includes
“Virginia Woolf,” by Martin Turnell, a literary appraisal. VG condition. Bought at silent auction
at 19th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, in NYC, June 2009, from the collection of Woolf
scholar Krystyna Colburn. Auction benefited Girls Write Now, a mentoring program run from
the New School.
The Criterion: A Quarterly Review. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber Ltd., April 1936
(Vol. 15, No. 60). Good condition: cover chipped, spine worn. Bought at Commonwealth Books,
Boston, on 6/8/10. Includes “Fiction Chronicle” by A. Desmond Hawkins. Hawkins assesses the
current discussion about the distinction (or lack thereof) between prose and poetry, a discussion
in which Woolf vociferously participated in essays such as “Poetry, Fiction and the Future”
(1927) and “A Letter to a Young Poet” (1932). Hawkins responds specifically to Louis
MacNeice, who had recently written in The Arts Today (1935, ed. Geoffrey Grigson) that “The
more sensitive novelists (e.g., Mrs. Virginia Woolf) are approaching poetic form.” Hawkins
disliked MacNeice’s argument that verse would overtake fiction, and he disliked too MacNeice’s
esteem of Woolf. In this “Fiction Chronicle,” he wrote:
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Miss [Dorothy] Richardson has an essentially feminine sensibility, and a very sterile
verbal inventiveness. Her idiom is a critical idiom, rapidly converting action into
abstraction, hurriedly evaporating minimal event into the very refined, very rarefied
vapour that is also exhaled (though with a more rainbowed hue) by that other most
ladylike lady, Mrs. Woolf. This is fine work, a most delicate embroidery of exquisite
nuance. It is even over-refined, a bit genteel from lack of an informing vitality, a spinning
of less out of little with the end in sight but never arriving. (486)
Virginia Woolf Quarterly. San Diego: San Diego UP, Summer 1973 (Vol. 1, No. 4). VG
condition. Green paper cover with graphic of waves designed by F. Gilot. Homemade-looking
gathering of typewritten pages in tape binding. Includes article, “The Bunin-KotelianskyLawrence-Woolf Version of ‘The Gentleman From San Francisco,’” by Leland Fetzer. Bought at
Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA, in Spring 2010. The Virginia Woolf Quarterly was founded
by John Lehmann (1907-1987) while he was at UC-Berkeley. Only three volumes were
published because it ceded to its competition, the still-thriving Virginia Woolf Miscellany,
founded by Stanford professor Lucio Ruotolo in 1973.
Hogarth Press publications, independent of Woolf’s work listed above
Hogarth Press Books
Bunin, I. A. The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories. 1922. Trans. S. S.
Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. D. H. Lawrence also credited as translator in errata slip, still
attached. NF condition: Beautiful blue, green, and yellow cover paper boards. No dj, as issued.
Woolmer 19. 1,000 copies printed. Bought at the San Francisco Antiquarian Book Fair, 2/16/09,
from MacDonnell Rare Books of Austin, TX.
Day-Lewis, C. Transitional Poem. Hogarth Living Poets No. 9. Ed. Dorothy Wellesley. 1929.
NF, robin’s-egg-blue boards. No dj, as issued. Woolmer 191. 400 copies printed. Bought by my
father for me at Daedalus Used Books, Charlottesville, VA, in July 2010. Cecil Day-Lewis was
one of the poets whose work Woolf criticized in “A Letter to a Young Poet.”
---. Noah and the Waters. Fine yellow cloth boards with gilt title, NF cream and red dj. 1936.
Woolmer 383b. 2,000 copies printed. Bought by my father for me at Daedalus Used Books,
Charlottesville, VA, in July 2010.
Forster, E. M. England’s Pleasant Land. 1940. Fine orange cloth boards in NF yellow dj lettered
in green. Woolmer 466. 2,030 copies printed. Bought at Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA, in
Spring 2010. This pageant play by Woolf’s good friend Forster may have influenced or
confirmed Woolf’s decision to set the action of Between the Acts at a country pageant.
Lehmann, John. Hogarth Living Poets No. 21: A Garden Revisited and Other Poems. 1931.
Original dark red boards lettered in black. No dj, as issued. Good condition: spine slightly
detached, cover slightly discolored at edges, some foxing on cover pages. Woolmer 262. 400
copies printed. Lehmann’s first book. Bought at silent auction at 19th Annual Virginia Woolf
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Conference, in NYC, June 2009, from the collection of Woolf scholar Krystyna Colburn.
Auction benefited Girls Write Now, a mentoring program run from the New School.
---, ed. Folios of New Writing. Spring 1941. NF orange cloth lettered in gilt, NF beige dj lettered
in green. Woolmer 477. Print-run number not known. Includes responses to Virginia Woolf’s
1941 “The Leaning Tower,” her second essay criticizing the young poets, from Louis MacNeice,
B. L. Coombes, Edward Upward and Lehmann. Bought at Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA, in
Spring 2010.
---, ed. Folios of New Writing. Autumn 1941. VG blue cloth with gilt lettering. Good, chipped,
white dj with orange lettering. Woolmer 478. 1,750 copies printed. Includes contributions by
Lehmann, Stephen Spender, Henry Green, William Plomer, Rex Warner, Dylan Thomas, Roy
Fuller, and David Gascoyne. Bought at Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA, in Spring 2010.
---, ed. New Writing Spring 1938. New York: Knopf. This is the first American edition of a
magazine first published by The Hogarth Press (Woolmer 433). Includes contributions by Bertolt
Brecht, Day-Lewis, Spender, and Christopher Isherwood. VG black boards in Good dj: priceclipped and chipped. Bookplate of Abe and Doris Waldman. Bought at Serendipity Books in
Berkeley, CA, in Spring 2010.
---. Forty Poems. The New Hogarth Library, Vol. IX. 1942. Fine yellow boards, light blue dj in
Good condition, with tanning at edges and spine of dj coming off. Woolmer 493. 1,500 copies
printed. Bought from Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA, in Fall 2008. Signed on front flyleaf:
‘John Hayward / from his erratic / nocturnal visitor-- / John / Christmas 1942.’
Book includes MS Lehmann letter! Not published. Postmarked 25 Aug. 1942 to John Hayward,
Esq. / Merton Hall (c/o Lord Rothschild) / Cambridge. Transcribed:
[stationary reads at top: 601 Carrington House Hertford Street. W.I. / Grosvenor 3181]
25.viii.42
My dear John,
I have asked my secretary to send you a copy of “New Writing and
Daylight,” and shall look forward to hearing any observations you may have to
make about it.
About Tambi’s book—I promised to let you know what the ____[illegible]
omissions seemed to me to be. I don’t want to do captions, as I like Tambi and am
interested in his work, and also derived considerable pleasure from the book;
however he admits himself that he didn’t complete his scenes [?]. I think that if he
puts Herbert Read in, he ought certainly to include work by Edith Sitwell (from
that wonderful “Street Song”), Robert Graves, Norman Cameron (from “Work in
Hand” or elsewhere) and William Plomer. All these have written work of real
value since the war began; and among the younger lot, the work of Peter Yates,
Adam Jinan [?] and Lawrence Little seems to me just as promising as an
apocalyptic horseman he has represented. Also, --and I think he agrees with me
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now—Roy Fuller has done far more impressive work than he has got hold of here.
There are others too, but I wouldn’t push them forward yet.
I gave Rosamond [Lehmann’s sister] your message. It was so very nice
seeing you.
Yours ever
John L.
Note: The first issue of New Writing and Daylight was published in September 1942
(Woolmer 494), and it is this that Lehmann promises to send to Hayward. This issue was
the first in a series of seven. John Hayward (1905-65) was a Cambridge friend of
Lehmann’s who became a great editor and archivist. He worked on editions of the Earl of
Rochester, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, and, in the 1950s and 1960s, T. S. Eliot. From
1946 to 1957 he lived with Eliot as a friend and secretary. “Tambi” is Tambimuttu, an
editor and poet. I have not yet identified the anthology in question.
Palmer, Herbert. Songs of Salvation, Sin, and Satire. 1925. VG condition: original red and blue
marbled boards with paste-down title, a white label lettered in black. No dj, as issued. Presented
to me by William Reese upon my receiving Yale’s Adrian van Sinderen Prize. Woolmer 72. 300
copies printed.
Roberts, Michael, ed. New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands. Hogarth Living Poets, First
Series, No. 24. 1932. Fine condition: striking blue cloth boards lettered in gilt, with no dj, as
issued; some tanning to spine. Woolmer 306. 600 copies printed. Includes work by W. H. Auden,
Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, William Plomer, William Empson, Julian Bell, John
Lehmann. Bought at Serendipity Books, Berkeley, CA, in Fall 2008.
Rylands, George H. W. Words and Poetry. New York: Payson & Clarke Ltd., 1928. Introduction
by Lytton Strachey. VG green-and-blue diamond-print boards with no dj, as issued. This is the
American first edition of a book originally published in 1928 by The Hogarth Press (Woolmer
175). Rylands worked at the Press for six months in 1924 and remained close friends of the
Woolfs. This book, Rylands’s Cambridge doctoral thesis, says much that corresponds to Woolf’s
convictions about the power of prose to take over the burden of poetry. Rylands writes, “Modern
poets have poached upon the preserves of prose, and modern novelists are returning the
compliment” (5). He cites Mrs Dalloway “as an example of prose employing poetic method”
because “the striking of Big Ben inspires a rhythmical phrase which is repeated” (75). Rylands
also perpetuates the argument of Woolf’s essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”: “Novelists (with
the exception of Arnold Bennett and the old school) are abandoning descriptive detail [ . . . ]
They describe emotionally, impressionistically like the poet” (n1 on 6).
Wolfe, Humbert. Notes on English Verse Satire. Hogarth Lectures, No. 10. 1929. VG orange
cloth boards lettered in red, VG orange dj lettered in red. Woolmer 212. 3,057 copies printed.
Bought at 20th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, in Georgetown, KY, for auction to benefit
Old Friends, a charity to take care of aging horses.
Hogarth Press Pamphlets
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Birrell, Francis. Letter from a Black Sheep—The Hogarth Letters No. 5. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1932. NF: cream wrappers printed in black and brown. Woolmer 281. 2,000 copies
printed; 500 copies bound up in collected edition of The Hogarth Letters. Bought from Jon
Richardson York Harbor Books, ME, in July 2009. Note: there are in total twelve Hogarth
Letters.
Betjeman, John. Antiquarian Prejudice—Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets, Number 3. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1939. Fine: orange wrappers lettered in brown. An essay originally delivered to
the Group Theatre. Woolmer 443. 3,000 copies printed. Bought from Jon Richardson of York
Harbor Books, ME, in July 2009. Note: there are in total five Sixpenny Pamphlets.
Forster, E. M. A Letter to Madan Blanchard--The Hogarth Letters No. 1. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1931. Fine: bright buff wrappers printed in black and blue. Woolmer 254. 5,000 copies
printed; 500 bound up in collected edition of The Hogarth Letters. The British Madan Blanchard
ventured upon a Robinson Crusoe-like existence on the island of Palau, Micronesia, after the
Antelope wrecked there in August 1783. He remained on the island in exchange for the Prince of
Palau, Lee Boo, who was taken back to England in order to become “civilized.” Forster archly
retells the story, stating as his premise: “I want to know why you stopped behind when the others
went.”
Forster, E. M. What I Believe—Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets, Number 1. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1939. NF: green wrappers lettered in red; slight browning to cover and edges. Woolmer
445. 5,000 copies printed.
Mortimer, Raymond. The French Pictures: A Letter to Harriet—The Hogarth Letters No. 4.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1932. NF: cream wrappers printed in orange and black; trace of
spotting on front edges. Woolmer 299. 2,500 copies printed, of which 500 bound up in collected
edition of The Hogarth Letters.
Spender, Stephen. The New Realism: A Discussion--Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets, Number 2.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1939. NF: some browning to edges of cover and pages, original
stitched binding. Woolmer 459. Number of copies printed unknown. Spender became a friend of
Woolf in 1933, even though in the 1932 “A Letter to a Young Poet” she had faulted his poetry
for being solipsistic. Throughout the 1930s they exchanged long letters about their work, and
after Woolf’s death Spender discussed Woolf and her work in his memoir World Within World
and in his several books of criticism.
Stewart, Jean. Poetry in France and England—Hogarth Lectures on Literature, First Series, No.
15. London: The Hogarth Press, 1931. NF: orange cloth lettered in red, orange dj lettered in red.
Woolmer 272. 2,750 copies printed, of which 250 set of sheets were sent to Harcourt, Brace in
America. Bought at silent auction at 20th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference to benefit Old
Friends charity, which cares for aging horses. Stewart later translated Jean Guiguet’s French
study of Woolf.
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Strong, L. A. G. A Letter to W. B. Yeats—The Hogarth Letters No. 6. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1932. Fine. Woolmer 310. 2,000 copies printed; 500 bound up in the collected edition of
The Hogarth Letters. This essay celebrates Yeats’s poetry and its evolution.
West, Rebecca. A Letter to a Grandfather—The Hogarth Letters No. 7. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1933. VG: cover edges slightly chipped and browned, binding tight and stapled—as
issued, I think. Woolmer 333. 2,500 copies printed. Woolmer does not mention stapling. He does
note that of the Hogarth Letters, this is “the only one to be bound in yapp wrappers.” Despite the
“No. 7” designation, this was actually the last—that is, the 12th—to be published in the series. As
such, it was not included in the collected edition of The Hogarth Letters (1933), a volume
designed to sell unsold copies of the other letters.
Woolf, Virginia. A Letter to a Young Poet—The Hogarth Letters No. 8. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1932. NF: slight browning to cover and pages, very tight. Green design on buff wrappers.
Woolmer 314. 6,000 copies printed; 500 bound up in collected edition of The Hogarth Letters.
Bought in Concord, MA, in Summer 2003 at Books With a Past. In this essay Woolf criticizes
the young male poets Lehmann, Spender, Auden, and Day-Lewis for writing egotistical verse
that does not reflect modern reality. She identifies their challenge as finding a form to blend
quotidian modern life (“the bicycle and the omnibus”) with beauty and lyricism (“daffodils”). A
solution she proposes is that they write about other people, the way Shakespeare and Crabbe did.
That is, she seems to argue against writing lyric poetry, which is literally self-centered, and
rather to argue for writing dramatic poetry, which is more like the novel in its concern for many
people. She wrote the essay at John Lehmann’s suggestion. As a young assistant to The Hogarth
Press, Lehmann had established the Hogarth Letters series. Knowing that Woolf had many
thoughts about the difference between poetry and prose, and the contemporary roles of each, he
encouraged her to write an essay advising young poets. Lehmann and the other young poets
quoted in the essay were not immensely pleased with the result.
---. Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown—The Hogarth Essays. London: The Hogarth Press, 1928. 2nd
Impression (first published 1924). Vanessa Bell black and white cover image of androgynous
person reading open book. Yellowing at top, else VG. Woolmer 54. 1,000 copies printed in this
2nd impression. Bought by my father at Daedalus Used Books, Charlottesville, CA, in July 2010.
In this essay, frequently anthologized and taken as Woolf’s definitive statement of her own
method, Woolf faults the Georgian novelists Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy
for their attention to material description at the expense of mental exploration. She proposes that
the novel should convey characters’ minds, just as she is beginning to do in her own fiction.
---. Reviewing, with a note by Leonard Woolf—Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets, Number 4.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1939. NF: some browning to edges of cover and pages, original
stitched binding. Woolmer 463. 5,140 copies printed. Bought at Boston Antiquarian Book Fair in
2006 from Peter Harrington.
---. Walter Sickert: A Conversation. London: The Hogarth Press,1934. Fine, with beautiful
Vanessa Bell feast cover design on pale blue paper. Woolmer 355. 3,800 copies printed. Bought
in Spring 2006 from William Reese with some of the Adrian van Sinderen prize.
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Rare scholarly books and other rare books associated with Woolf
Bell, Clive. Civilization: An Essay. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1928. First
American Edition. Good condition: original black boards, title and author rewritten onto spine
with white ink, last few pages uncut, missing dj. Opens with three-page short essay titled
“Dedication to Virginia Woolf.” Bought at The Strand in 2007. Clive Bell had married Vanessa
Stephen, Virginia’s sister, in 1907, and had enjoyed a brief flirtation with Virginia while Vanessa
tended to the Bells’ first son, Julian. But by 1928 Clive’s relationship with both Vanessa and
Virginia was platonic. This book embarrassed the dedicatee and many others in the fairly
socialist Bloomsbury circle because it argued that an elite leisured class was necessary for a
“civilized” society.
Guiguet, Jean. Virginia Woolf et Son Oeuvre: L’Art et la Quête du Réel. Paris: Études Anglaises
13: Didier, 1962. VG first ed., some pages uncut; pages browned at edges, some pencil
underlining. Inscribed: “With the author’s / compliments / Jean Guiguet.” Bought at The
Strand’s upstairs Rare Book Dept. in 2008. This is a classic French study of Woolf that details
the history of criticism on Woolf until 1962 and thoughtfully surveys Woolf’s essays, novels,
stories, and biographies. The concluding chapter remains one of the best assessments of Woolf’s
project, and ranges from the arguable problems of Woolf’s work to her humor and lyricism.
Guiguet understands Woolf’s desire to achieve in prose the density of poetry:
For her, only intensity mattered. All her quest, all her efforts were devoted to the
elimination of wasted time, to the expression of pure intensity; and that is the way that
leads to poetry. The shower of atoms, the myriad impressions that struck her [these are
Woolf’s descriptions], always called forth, sooner or later, that lyric note mingling
wonder and anguish, and striving, through the opacity of language, to render the emotion
of a human beings at grips with the obsessive mysteries: life, love and death—and time
and space, which are the forms under which we apprehend them. (in Jean Stewart’s
English translation for The Hogarth Press, 1965)
Lee, Hermione. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. NF hb in VG dj. New York: Holmes & Meier
Publishers, 1977. First US ed. Cover illustration of Roger Fry’s “Woman in a Garden.”
Hermione Lee, Woolf’s most thorough and just biographer, published this study as her first
book. It remains one of the finest books centered on Woolf’s novels. Lee positions her study as
specifically not about Woolf’s childhood sexual abuse, mental illness, marriage, or sexuality,
subjects that drained many inkpots in the 1970s. She insists that to understand Woolf’s writing
one should focus on the text, not the life, and demonstrates the rewards of this focus. Of course,
in her 1997 biography, she is appreciative of the value of the life to understanding the work.
Lehmann, John. The Open Night. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1952. Good condition:
slightly discolored cream cloth boards, missing dj, inside tight. Includes essay “Virginia Woolf,”
in which Lehmann analyzes the writer’s “novel-poems.” Lehmann gently argues that Woolf
succeeded in her aim of absorbing elements of poetry into her fiction. He writes that after her
experimental short stories published in Monday or Tuesday (1921):
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from that moment onwards Virginia Woolf was to remain more poet than novelist,
forever searching for new means of dissolving prose into poetry, of refining away all but
the husk of action in works which still went under the name of novels, and irradiating
them with this strange new light. (27)
Maitland, Frederick W. The Life and Letters of Sir Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth and Co.,
and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906. First edition. Good+ condition: original leather-andmarble boards, cover chipped and hinges loose, but text and images bright and intact. Bought at
Serendipity Books in Berkeley, CA, in Spring 2010. This first biography of Leslie Stephen
includes Virginia Woolf’s (then Stephen’s) first time in print in book form (she had begun
publishing unsigned book reviews in 1904). Maitland prints the young writer’s reminiscence of
her father that focuses on his recitation of poetry, crediting the words to “one of his [i.e.
Stephen’s] daughters.” Here is a selection from Virginia Stephen’s reminiscence:
His memory for poetry was wonderful; he could absorb a poem that he liked almost
unconsciously from a single reading [ . . . ] The poets whose work he most cared to recite
were, I think, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, whose ‘Scholar Gipsey’ was
one of his greatest favourites. He very much disliked reading poems from a book, and if
he could not speak from memory he generally refused to recite at all. His recitation, or
whatever it may be called, gained immensely from this fact, for as he lay back in his chair
and spoke the beautiful words with closed eyes, we felt that he was speaking not merely
the words of Tennyson or Wordsworth but what he himself felt and knew. Thus many of
the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not
only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief. (475-6)
Miscellaneous
Postcard of Godrevy Lighthouse. Postmark 1944. Sender writes about good weather and a visit
to Zennor, a little coastal town near St. Ives. The Godrevy lighthouse is the model for that of To
the Lighthouse. The young Virginia Stephen could see it from her family’s summer home in St.
Ives, Cornwall, a house still standing though subdivided into smaller rooms to increase its guest
capacity as a bed-and-breakfast. I bought the postcard in St. Ives in Summer 2005, along with a
postcard of the Parish Church in which Woolf and her older brother Thoby hid out during a
rainstorm.
Letterpress broadside titled “Pieces of Peace,” featuring two columns taken from the
concordance to Woolf’s fiction, featuring passages with the word “peace.” Published by
Cuneiform Press. 18" x 6". Handset from Dante type and printed on Zecchi in an
edition of 100. Red and black ink. Given to me upon Yale graduation in Summer 2006 by Nancy
Kuhl, Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature, for which I worked as a curatorial
assistant through my time at Yale.
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