While we have been working away on the final stages of our collaborative book project, Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (forthcoming as a short Palgrave Pivot title), the Hogarth Press has had its 99th birthday! Thanks to Rhys Tranter for posting http://rhystranter.com/2016/03/23/hogarth-press-founded-23-march-1917/
Birthday dates are always interesting. According to her diary, the Woolfs first talked about purchasing a Printing press on her 33rd birthday while sitting at tea in Buszard's Tea Room on Oxford Street (Monday 25 January 1915). On the 17th February 1915 (at the beginning of a long onset of illness, leaving a two year gap in her diaries), she and Leonard went to Farringdon Street to see a man about a printing press. On the 23 March 1917 they went back to the Excelsior Printing Supply Co. on Farringdon Street and bought a small "Eclipse" handpress. The parts and type were delivered to Hogarth House on 24th April 1917 - unpacked 'with enormous excitement' but the press was smashed and needed to be mended. By 2 May 1917 they had hand-set a one-page notice to announce their first publication and by 22 May, according to her correspondence, they had started printing Leonard's story. By 21 July 1917 they were 'nearly at an end of our copies' (Letters 2: 165), having raised the price of Publication No. 1, Two Stories, to 2 shillings.
Its a fascinating story of beginnings, with lots of opportunities to eat cake!
