There have been many memoirs of life among the Bloomsberries, but none more wickedly frank or funny than A Boy at the Hogarth Press.
In 1926, at the age of 16, Richard Kennedy left school without a single qualification and went to work at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Though home from home for London’s intellectual élite, the Press’s damp basement at Tavistock Square was anything but elegant, with the legendarily mean LW keeping a close check on everything, including the toilet paper, and frequently exploding when confronted with RK’s latest idiocy. The Woolfs clearly developed a fondness for their apprentice, but when he left several years later LW pronounced him ‘the most frightful idiot he [had] ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools’.
Rarely has High Art been so candidly observed at close quarters or so beguilingly combined with domestic detail than in Richard Kennedy’s A Boy at the Hogarth Press. We recognize many similarities between the Woolf’s publishing house and our own, as it’s so often ‘all hands to the pumps’ with us ‘all lined up at the packing bench’ here at Slightly Foxed HQ! Click here to read an extract from the book
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Jennie, Anna, Hattie & Jess