The first UK edition of The Waste Land, handset and printed by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press.
 
Octavo. Bound in the original blue marbled paper covered boards, with the title label to the upper cover printed in black surrounded with a border of asterisks. This is Gallup’s state one of three, albeit without priority attributed between them.
 
A very good, unsophisticated copy of this notoriously fragile book. The front and rear covers are bright, the spine is toned as it often is, and there is a little wear to the spine ends and joints. In places there are some splits to the marbled paper, and on the rear joint two small fragments have flaked away, the larger of which is loosely laid into the book itself. The final gathering, with Previous Publications of the Hogarth Press to the recto of the first leaf, in unopened. Old pencil price of “4/6”, the original price on publication, to front free endpaper.
 
PROVENANCE: From the library of Norah Hartley (1904-1994), sister and literary executor of the novelist L.P. Hartley (1895-1972); by descent to Hartley godson Benoit Judot, with his attractive Fletton Tower bookplate to the front pastedown, which reads “From the books at Fletton Tower, Peterborough, bequeathed by Norah Hartley to her godson Benoit Judot, 1994”.
 
One of the iconic books of the twentieth century, the first UK edition of The Waste Land, one of around 460 copies handset by Virginia Woolf and printed at her Hogarth Press.
 
Eliot’s revolutionary poem had been published in book form in America the year before, as a result of him winning a poetry contribution, but its appearance in the UK in this smaller edition was Eliot’s preferred one, and a result of his friendship with Virginia and Leonard Woolf.
 
The Woolfs had published a slim volume of Eliot’s poems in 1919, and they in the summer of 1923, they set to work on The Waste Land. Virginia Woolf handset each piece of type herself that summer, and wrote to Barbara Bagenal with a perceptible sense of achievement on 8th July to report that she “just finished setting the whole of Mr. Eliots poems with my own hands”.
 
The Woolfs printed around 460 copies on the poem, housing it in its now iconic binding of blue marbled paper, and by 11th February 1925, the edition was out of print, with 443 copies having been sold (the remaining 17 were retained or presented).
 
The early reviewers were not ubiquitous in their acclaim. Reviewing the book in the Manchester Guardian, Charles Powell declared the Hogarth Press edition was “not for the ordinary reader. He will make nothing of it” and dismissed it as “so much waste paper”.
 
Despite the bafflement of most reviewers in the British press, “undergraduates and young writers saw it as the revelation of a modern sensibility” (Ackroyd). Ezra Pound called it “the justification of the movement”, and Cyril Connolly recalled the profound effect it had on young writers and artists, of “the drugged and haunted condition which the new poet produced on some of us”.
 
Today, it stands as one of the great poems of the twentieth century, but the Hogarth Press Waste Land reminds us of its humble and fragile beginnings.