HNN Press

In April 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf excitedly unpacked the new printing press that had just been delivered to Hogarth House—their new home in Richmond, England—and hence was Hogarth Press born. One of the main reasons they began their own press was to publish small books that would not interest commercial publishers at the time. This would also give Virginia complete creative control over her work. She “could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisher.” Virginia said of herself that she was “‘the only woman in England free to write what I like.’ The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her own.” Not only did the Woolfs publish almost all of Virginia’s body of work, they also published their avant-garde Bloomsbury friends: Clive Bell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, and Vita Sackville-West. (Despite how they felt about James Joyce’s Ulysses, it was impossible for Virginia to typeset by hand that enormous tome!) Like the Woolfs, we have decided to begin our own publishing venture. Since we currently have no charming English house (which the English love to name!), we chose instead a whimsical Elizabethan term made famous by William Shakespeare in various plays but most notably in Much Ado About Nothing: Then sigh not so, but let them go, And be you blithe and bonny; Converting all your sounds of woe Into Hey nonny nonny!