The Hogarth Press (London, UK)
Series dates: 1937
Size: 4.75″ x 7.25″
Revised 5/17/2023
The Hogarth Press series World-Makers & World-Shakers included four titles, all written for the series, and all issued in 1937. This brief series is the subject of a scholarly book chapter entitled “Alternative Histories: The Hogarth Press World-Makers and World-Shakers Series” (published in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, edited by Claire Battershill & Nicola Wilson, 2018).
“Confronting the rising Nazi threat in Europe and Britain in July 1937, the Hogarth Press published four short biographies under the series title World-Makers and World-Shakers. The choice of subjects appeared random, ranging over centuries, disciplines and nationalities from Socrates and Joan of Arc to Darwin and Italian Risorgimento figures—Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour. Perusal in the Hogarth Press archive of Leonard Woolf ’s initial solicitations to prospective writers reveals that the final biographers (not Woolf ’s first choices) were either friends of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, previously published Hogarth authors, or popular writers likely to appeal to a broadly middlebrow public. In retrospect, both the subjects and their biographers suggest the Woolfs’ commitment to a new genre with a pedagogical purpose, one particularly pertinent given the imminent threat of Fascism. Juvenile biography with its target audience of twelve-to-sixteen year-olds offered humane historical models to counter the ominous contemporary political movers and shakers in Germany and Italy as well as the patriarchal and dictatorial figures Woolf would deride in Three Guineas. Closer to home, the series provided counter-examples to Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists’ advocacy of a “masculinist ethic” in elementary and secondary education. In keeping with the anti-Fascist premise, Leonard Woolf asked artist and radical political activist John Banting to design the dust jacket for the four biographies. Louisa Buck described the illustration as “a tree transforming itself into a linear classical nude on the four volumes…,” and she and J. H. Willis concur that the covers strongly suggested a surrealist influence.”
The four titles in the series are
Darwin, by L.B. Pekin
Socrates, by Naomi Mitchison & R.H.S. Crossman
Joan of Arc, by V. Sackville-West
Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour, by Margery Strachey
The jackets are common to the series, and feature an illustration by John Banting. The series name is at the top of the jacket front, with the book title and author at the bottom. The jacket spine includes (top to bottom) the series name, price (1/6), title and author, and publisher. The front jacket flap includes a blurb about the book and an indication of the illustrator of the jacket.
The rear of the jacket includes another Banting illustration.
The book is bound in orange cloth with black with the series name, title, and author,
Blank end-papers:
The half-title page with the series name and book title.
The reverse of the half-title includes the three additional titles in the series.
A portrait of Darwin faces the title page. The title page includes the year of publication (1937).
“First published 1937”
“Printed in Great Britain by the Garden City Press Ltd., at Letchworth, Hertfordshire.”
