VIRGINIA WOOLF FIRST EDITIONS AT
ASH RARE BOOKS
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[London] : Hogarth Press, 1927. Third edition : limited to 500 numbered copies. Originally published in May 1919 in a small edition of perhaps 170 copies, with a second edition of 500 copies a month later, the present edition is the first to be illustrated and decorated by Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) throughout.
Crown 4to (27cm). [48]pp. Illustrations and decorations throughout. Original decorative boards in a design by Vanessa Bell; the notoriously fragile spine has been skilfully restored and repaired; edges worn and some slight marking and scuffing; endpapers lightly tanned, but a good and clean copy within. Tiny contemporary gift inscription from Leonora to Maurice – probably the actress Leonora Freeman (1914-1997) and her husband, the writer Maurice Cardiff (1915-2006), who eloped to marry in 1939.

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London : Duckworth & Co., (1919). First edition : [one of 2,000 copies printed]. Her second novel – an intriguing exploration of contemporary mores – love, marriage, happiness and success.
Crown 8vo (188 x 119mm). [iv],538,[ii]pp. Bound in a smart recent full blue-black morocco, banded, gilt and worked in blind; top edge gilt; marbled endpapers; a few minor internal marks and tiny creases, but a very attractive copy with a custom-made slip-case. Kirkpatrick A4a.

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London : Hogarth Press, (1943) [i.e. 1944]. First edition. Eighteen short stories, twelve of them either previously unpublished or unpublished in book form. With a foreword by Leonard Woolf. “All the great qualities of Mrs. Woolf’s work are to be found in this volume ... the magical power of observation, the finest sensibility of the age, the loving command of language ... that elusiveness which is at the same time, in Mrs. Woolf’s hands, a kind of precision” (Birmingham Daily Post, 11th February 1944).
Crown 8vo (19cm). 124pp. Original red cloth, lettered in gilt; small patch of fading at head; some marking to covers; text slightly tanned, as usual; a good copy of a frail wartime publication, in the fragile original black and white Vanessa Bell dust-jacket – chipped at head, not affecting lettering, lightly marked, with a few short nicks and tears, but in better than usual order.

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London : Hogarth Press, 1977-1984. A complete first edition set of the diaries, 1915-1941, in five volumes. Introduced by Quentin Bell and edited by Anne Olivier Bell.
Five volumes. Medium 8vo (25cm). Endpaper maps. Original boards; a few minor marks and signs of light use, but a very good set in the attractive Duncan Grant dust-jackets – one price-clipped and one just faintly creased. Kirkpatrick A48a, etc.

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London : Hogarth Press, 1979. First edition. The fifth of the six published volumes of the letters: letters to Vanessa Bell, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, etc. – "an illuminating commentary on the social, cultural and political climate of the early 1930s, as well as the self-portrait of one of the most remarkable women of this century". Edited and introduced by Nigel Nicolson.
Medium 8vo (25cm). xx,476pp. Portrait frontispiece. Original boards; just a hint of spotting to edges, but very good in the Angelica Garnett dust-jacket – price-clipped, just lightly used and faintly sunned. With the bookplate of the well-known bookseller and crime-writer George Sims (1923-1999). Kirkpatrick A54a.

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Revere : Woolmer / Brotherson, (1986). Second and definitive edition. An enlarged and revised version of the original 1976 publication. The standard work, a full bibliography of the press, together with a short history by Mary E. Gaither.
Medium 8vo (24cm). (xxxvi),250,[ii]pp. Illustrations. Original cloth; lightly bruised, but a very good, clean and sound copy in a lightly sunned dust-jacket.

£25

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