Virginia Woolf: The Bookbinder and the Bibliophile

The triumph of Virginia Woolf’s career as a novelist is one of the most famous stories of the 20th century. Her career as a publisher of her home-grown Hogarth Press is a little less widely acknowledged. But Virginia Woolf is known to have engaged herself for many hours folding, stapling, sewing and gluing the publications which she and her husband Leonard had tried printing (at least to start) with the small platen press they had set up in their home. What is even less acknowledged is that Virginia Woolf maintained a private practice re-wrapping the books in her own library with colorful decorative papers, leather and cloth. I maintain that Woolf’s less-publicized engagement with the materiality of the book provides a rare opportunity to take a fresh look at one of the most widely read and admired writers of the 20th century. Her private library is a unique collection, which seems to anticipate a do-it-yourself aesthetic even while drawing heavily on established literary traditions. It is strangely neglected piece of evidence that serves, perhaps, as a too-readily-accessible reminder that Virginia Woolf was categorically opposed to notions of “mastery” and had not at all aspired to the role of luminary that she has come to represent in the Anglo-American canon