What started as a hobby would become a vocation and, in later years, his sole source of income. Leonard’s commitment to the press would be lifelong, carrying on through the interwar period and then the second world war and even after Virginia’s tragic death. Leonard, while happy to have cut out the middle-man, also revelled in the new venture, declaring in a letter: “I should never do anything else, you cannot think how exciting, soothing, ennobling and satisfying it is.” Virginia's lover Vita Sackville-West demanded more money from the Woolfs. (Woolf would also later accuse him of molesting her when she was a child.) The acute anxiety she felt when waiting for answers from publishers was partially eliminated by Hogarth. He was a man who, in her words, could not tell “a book from a beehive” and had no interest in avant garde writing. Virginia had long resented relying on her half-brother Gerald Duckworth to be her publisher. The press also fulfilled a desire for creative freedom that both Leonard and Virginia had craved. The experience was a simulacrum of the creative process: the beloved final product did not always reflect the pains of its production.But the labours of printing always delivered the satisfaction of a real and tangible object.
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Those first afternoons, when Leonard and Virginia sat covered in ink in the drawing room of Hogarth House, learning by trial and error just how hard it was to set type and centre it on the page, were charmed ones. It almost lived up to all these weighty expectations.
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It was a physically engrossing activity to ease Virginia’s crippling anxiety, a business that could potentially free the couple from the whims of publishers and even a social outlet through which their diverse literary friendships could be monetised.
The publishing business that the two set up in their drawing room and which would eventually to take up their dining room, then much of their lives, was supposed to be an answer to so much. So the Hogarth Press was born, and like all parents the Woolfs declared their lives changed forever.