Jacob's Room

Richmond: The Hogarth Press, 1922. First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine/No Jacket. 0x0x0. First trade edition, one of 1200 copies, following the 40-copy Subscriber's Edition (Kirkpatrick A6a). Lacks jacket. Boards lightly soiled, though considerably less so than we generally see with this title (the yellow cloth was especially prone to becoming dirty and dingy). Minor loss from left edge of paper spine label ('J' lost), also a common flaw with this edition. Corners lightly bruised, small bookseller plate on rear endpaper. 1922 Hard Cover. 290, 14 pp. A novel by the feminist author and publisher known for Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own, etc. She and her husband Leonard founded The Hogarth Press, and they were both members of The Bloomsbury Group, a literary society composed of numerous important intellectuals and writers of the time. The first full-length book printed by The Hogarth Press. "With the publication of Jacob's Room the decision was taken to establish the Hogarth Press as a business concern and in future to publish all Mrs Woolf's works." (Kirkpatrick A6a) "All through Jacob's Room his would-be biographer talks directly to the reader: we two push ourselves forward—busy, agog, distractable—while our subject slips out of sight. The would-be biographer is vibrating 'at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all … What remains is mostly a matter of guess work. Yet over him we hang vibrating.' The biographic obsession is comic in its futility. The deliberately fragmented narrative with its curt sentences, its gaps and tantalizing glimpses, compels us to share in the biographer's effort and failure." - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography