‘Classics behind plate glass’: The Hogarth Press and the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf

In her letter on the Middlebrow collected in The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf wrote: “I dislike bound volumes of the classics behind plate glass.” Despite her proclaimed mistrust of the “middlebrow” sphere, Woolf was aware that cheap series of reprints could widen her readership and consolidate her literary reputation. In 1928, she wrote the introduction to Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey for the Oxford World’s Classics edition (as explained in Chapter 1). And in 1929, the Hogarth Press started publishing Uniform Editions of her work. As J. H. Willis has argued, “to put a living novelist’s works into a standard edition is to make a claim for the permanence and importance of the writer’s work, to establish a canon, to suggest the classic.” This chapter, based on extensive research in the Hogarth Press archive, argues that the Uniform Editions published by the Hogarth Press achieved at least three things: (1) they reached a wide audience of common readers in Britain; (2) they encouraged Harcourt Brace to issue a similar edition in the United States; and (3) they presented Woolf as a canonical writer whose work deserved to be “collected.” In short, thanks to the Uniform Editions, Woolf’s texts became “classics behind plate glass.”

‘Parasitic publishers’? Tauchnitz, Albatross and the Continental Diffusion of Anglophone Modernism

In 1933, Ezra Pound deplored modernism’s transition from “small honest magazines” to large-scale publishing houses. He described Tauchnitz and Albatross as “parasitic publishers,” eager to exploit James Joyce’s fame to make money. But this story leaves aside a central element: the fact that Joyce and Pound had eagerly courted publishers of cheap editions. Only when the interest of these publishers was no longer in doubt did Pound dismiss them as parasites eager to cash in on the growing popularity of modernism. This chapter is organised chronologically, starting with Joyce’s early relationship with Tauchnitz. It shows that the transnational nature of Tauchnitz, a German publisher of Anglophone literature, particularly appealed to expatriate modernists such as Joyce. The chapter then turns to the period from 1929 to 1932, at the time when Max Christian Wegner was manager-in-chief of Tauchnitz and attempted to modernise the company before co-founding Albatross. Wegner understood that titles by Joyce, Woolf and Lewis could appeal to a wide audience in Europe. The last section is on Albatross, a publisher that not only helped to popularise modernist texts, but was also shaped by the modernist movement. Its stylish covers and intrinsic cosmopolitanism exemplify modernism’s growing influence on mainstream culture in the 1930s.

Rewriting Tarr Ten Years Later: Wyndham Lewis, the Phoenix Library and the Domestication of Modernism

Four years before his death, Wyndham Lewis wrote to the modernist scholar Hugh Kenner: “In Tarr I had in view a publique d’élite.” This image of a difficult, uncompromising novel for an élite could well apply to the first version of Tarr – completed in 1915 and published by the Egoist Press in Britain and by Knopf in the United States in 1918. But in 1928, Lewis accepted an offer to reprint his novel in the newly created Phoenix Library, sold for only 3 shillings and 6 pence. Lewis decided to re-write the entire novel for this edition. At that time in his career, Lewis was eager to address not a “publique d’élite,” but a large audience who had never read Tarr before. Writing for the large audience that would read his novel in a cheap format, Lewis made his style much more accessible and less confusing for the common reader. Drawing on archival research in the Chatto & Windus records, this chapter takes the example of Tarr to argue that the Phoenix Library not only made available modernism to a much wider audience, but also transformed the modernist text itself.

Conclusion

The Travellers’ Library, Phoenix Library and Albatross Modern Continental Library were discontinued during the Second World War, at a time when issues such as paper rationing and distribution problems affected all publishers. An attempt to revive them after the war did not succeed. This is surprising for two main reasons. First, the academic study of modernism was by then on the rise. And across the Atlantic, the Modern Library series was more popular than ever, despite the competition of paperback series. The conclusion answers the following questions: why did European series associated with modernism fail to find a public in the years that followed WW2? In what format did readers encounter modernist texts – at a time when modernism was institutionalised in the university system?

Pocketable Provocateurs: James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence in the Travellers’ Library and the New Adelphi Library

In early 1926, the debate between the home secretary William Joynson-Hicks and the MP Joseph Kenworthy led to a series of articles on indecent books and plays. The Bookseller, the main magazine of the book trade, explored several solutions to the problem of “sex novels,” including putting these books out of the view of young and female readers. It is in this context that two publishers launched new series of modern, copyrighted texts, including titles by controversial authors. James Joyce’s Dubliners and D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy were among the first books that Jonathan Cape selected for his Travellers’ Library. Martin Secker also reprinted many titles by Lawrence in his New Adelphi Library – starting with The Captain’s Doll. Drawing on extensive archival research at the University of Reading, this chapter argues that the success of Cape’s and Secker’s series proved that there was a large market for the most contentious modern writers. The three-and-six-penny libraries used the modernists’ subversive reputation as a selling point to market Joyce and Lawrence to a wide public.

Introduction: Discovering Modernism – Travel, Pleasure and Publishers’ Series

The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.

‘Introductions by eminent writers’: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in the Oxford World’s Classics Series

This chapter focuses on the introductions that T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf wrote for the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (both published in 1928). Oxford University Press, whose London branch bought the World’s Classics from Grant Richards in 1905, was known for its Bibles and scholarly works, not for literary experimentation. So why would such a staid publisher include an introduction by Eliot, a writer with “a sustained interest in rotting orifices”? Why would a series associated with an old English university value the opinion of Woolf, who repeatedly criticised the patriarchal structure of the academic system? This chapter argues that, by the late 1920s, Woolf and Eliot had become well-known names recognisable by the lower middle class, the self-educated and other readers of the World’s Classics. They lent their growing reputation to boost sales of reprints, and in turn, they benefited from their association with a large-scale publishing enterprise (including access to a wide American readership). The World’s Classics contributed to transforming the image of these modernist writers from infamous avant-gardists to members of the artistic establishment.