THE HOGARTH PRESS A
lthough Kauffer designed only a handful of book jackets for The Hogarth Press, it has been argued that he was key to its transformation from being just amateur to becoming professional. Elizabeth Gordon claimed that: ‘In including Kauffer’s work and name the Press added a different and yet compatible discourse about artistic purpose and productions’
– that Kauffer helped draw the Woolfs into the mainstream. Leonard and Virginia Woolf had taken up the craft of handprinting in 1915 as a way of Virginia relaxing from her intense brainwork in writing. They began hand-printing books, not in the elitist sense of the dozens of small private presses springing up in the early decades of the 20th century, but, at first, just as gifts for family and friends and then, as they declared on their fifth anniversary: ‘We aimed in the first place at producing works of genuine merit that could scarcely hope to secure publication through ordinary channels.’
Opposite: Cover illustration for The Man Below, 1939, by H.T. Hopkinson. Sir Tom Hopkinson became better known as a journalist and the editor of Picture Post. Above: Kauffer’s, c.1928, logo for The Hogarth Press, although this version appears to have been used less frequently than Vanessa Bell’s design.
Their intent was not so much moneymaking as missionary; but nevertheless The Hogarth Press in fact became something of a 39
