The Hogarth Press was a phenomenon. It was launched in 1917 to produce LITERATURE. Nothing less would do for Bloomsbury. Surprisingly, it was a very modest affair to start with. Its proprietors, Virginia and Leonard Woolf — after months of procrastination — visited the Excelsior Printing Supply Company where they purchased a small hand press with enough type to set up two pages, and an instruction booklet. Their total expenditure was £19 5s 6d. From these unremarkable beginnings the Hogarth Press was born.

The first publication from the press was to be a very slim volume, comprising two short stories, one from Virginia, The Mark on the Wall, and one from Leonard, Three Jews. Each character of type was laboriously set by hand and 150 copies were produced. The sheets were also hand bound, with a few woodcuts by Dora Carrington providing the ornament. Sold by subscription at 1/6d, it must have seemed an amusing trifle, even to the friends, like Lytton Strachey, who bought them. Were the copies well preserved, however, their descendants would be holding a few small sheets (thirty-one pages) worth upwards of £5000 today. They managed to sell 134 copies and reportedly made £7 in profit, through this did not take into account their own labour or royalties. Nevertheless it was a credible performance for the first title from a small press.

Their next effort was more ambitious: a sixty-eight page story by Katherine Mansfield, called The Prelude. Realizing that the labour involved in setting this up would be daunting, Leonard decided to put the work out to a “proper” printer, who produced 300 copies to be sold at 3/6d.

Now Hogarth Press was beginning to take off — artistically, if not yet financially. More titles followed, including poetry by T.S. Eliot, and a sixteen-page story, Kew Gardens, by Virginia. When the latter sold out at 2/-, and a new print run of 500 had to be ordered from a commercial printer, the press was in business as a publisher of note. Today, apart from Penguin, Hogarth Press is the only really collectable imprint on the bibliophile circuit.

John Ruskin also became a self-publisher, using one of his own employees, George Allen — later founder of George Allen & Unwin — to handle the whole business for him. Thus many of Ruskin’s works were published under Allen’s name from his cottage in Orpington, Kent. This approach alienated many booksellers, and even readers, who found his books difficult to obtain. But Ruskin was ever his own man, and in 1887, George Allen announced a profit of £4000.

In our own day, self-publishing by recognized authors is still a feature of the book scene. Jill Paton Walsh and Susan Hill are surprising examples. Indeed, Susan Hill publishes a literary journal from her home in the Cotswolds and has published a volume of her own short stories.

The name that most readily springs to mind, however, is that of Alfred Wainwright, a rather stolid borough treasurer, whose love of the fells bore strange fruit in a long and somewhat isolated life. Wainwright was a one-off’s one-off. His many works, some of them simply maps, explored and commented on the wild hill country of the British Isles, especially Lakeland, where he lived. Contrarily, he developed a caligraphic method which, like Blake’s, completely bypassed the need for typesetting and the compositor’s skills. His particular method, however, was made possible by the advent of offset lithography, which created the printing plate largely by photographic techniques

The plates were far too detailed and complex to be amenable to the hand-work required for each of Blake’s printed sheets. Wainwright’s hand-written spreads employed justified text, roman and italic lettering, as well as a range of heading weights which give a quaint but professional feel to his pages. Naturally, Wainwright was a self-publisher, at least in his early career. Later he was published by Michael Joseph.

Hunter Davies, Wainwright’s biographer, self-published his own guide to the Lake District in the early 1980s. True to form, he collected additional funds by writing and broadcasting about the experience, so the raw data he gives does not present the whole picture of the enterprise.

The cost of printing 10,000 copies of the 200 page title was £6000. A major publisher distributed the book and, presumably on the Davies “brand-name” alone, obtained advanced orders of around 9000. From the gross receipts, however, the author–publisher retained some 13%, or £4000, to cover his own efforts. A poor reward. I suspect even so, that Hunter had a lot of fun doing it.