slapdash worker, and in other branches almost as much an amateur as I was. I gave him Monday or Tuesday to print. Bound in paper bds [ sic ] with a woodcut designed by Vanessa and 4 in the text. My greatest mistake was to let him choose the paper. He produced a nasty spongy antique wove. I went down & helped him print the beastly thing. I have never seen a more desperate, ludicrous – but for me tragic – scene than McD insisting on ptg [ sic ] with the letterpress. The consequence was that in order to get the right ‘colour’ for the illustrations, he had to get 4 or 5 times more ink on his rollers than was right for the type, soon dogged with ink; but that was not the worst. Fluffy little bits of paper were torn off with the ink & stuck to the blocks, to the rollers & eventually to the type. We had to stop every few minutes & clean everything but even so the pages were an appalling sight. We machined 1000 copies, & at the end we sank down exhausted and speechless on the floor by the side of the machine where we sat & silently drank beer until I was sufficiently revived to crawl batter & broken back to Hogarth House”. Senhouse’s views broadly concur with Leonard Woolf’s account given in his autobiography Beginning Again (1964). Senhouse’s comments on the poor quality of the book’s production has been noted many times by collectors over the years, poorly imprinted on paper which feels of a low quality. Alongside the slip, Senhouse has noted on the front free endpaper “1000 copies / ‘The Prompt Press’”, and underneath “A Haunted House – Asheham / A Society - hints at ‘Dreadnaught’ Hoax”. These few words cover a range of Bloomsbury ground: Asheham House was where the Woolfs spent most of their holidays from 1912 to 1919, and hosted parties for members of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House was based on Asheham, with both Woolfs believing it to be haunted. The “Dreadnought Hoax” was a prank involving Virginia Woolf, her brother Adrian Stephen, and painter Duncan Grant, who disguised themselves as Abyssinian princes and won an audience on HMS Dreadnought . The
94
94 WOOLF, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday. With woodcuts by Vanessa Bell. Richmond: The Hogarth Press, 1921 Roger Senhouse’s annotated copy First edition, first impression, Roger Senhouse’s copy, with his bookplate, ownership signature and pencil notes to front free endpaper, and his slip of ink notes on the printing of the book, which he helped with, and which he deplores as “one of the worst printed books ever published”. Senhouse (1899–1970), educated at Eton and Oxford, was a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group and in 1935 became partner with Fredric Warburg of the publishing firm Secker & Warburg, where he published translations of Colette and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as important English titles such as his fellow Etonian George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm . He was a lover of Lytton Strachey, who first met Senhouse in 1924, and Strachey’s affair with the handsome young Old Etonian lasted from 1925 until just before Strachey’s death in 1932. Virginia Woolf arranged the printing of Monday or Tuesday by the printer F. T. McDermott at the Prompt Press in Richmond, as the demand for orders outstripped what the Hogarth Press’s small hand press could produce. Senhouse aided McDermott with the printing, a project he felt was a disaster, and his slip of notes in a cramped hand on the publication provides a valuable insight into the book’s genesis. “The Prompt Press ‘lucus a non lucendo’ [Latin: ‘lamp without a light’] I am sorry to say reproduced one of the worst printed books ever published – A 1st class compositor (printers of The Spectator ), he was a terribly impatient,
INEXHAUSTIBLE LIFE
64
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker