Woolf, Virginia | A celebration of the common reader, and the necessity of literature

From the Library of Clayre and Jay Michael Haft

Woolf, Virginia

Two first editions of The Common Reader

The Common Reader. London: The Hogarth Press, 1925. 8vo (218 x 140 mm). Publisher's primary binding of cloth-backed paper boards, pictorial upper cover illustrated by Vanessa Bell in the rare Bell-designed dustjacket; jacket spine lightly faded, rear panel and folds a trifle rubbed, tiny chip at top edge of rear panel. — The Common Reader: Second Series. London: The Hogarth Press, 1932. 8vo (220 x 140 mm). Publisher's gilt-titled green cloth in dustjacket illustrated by Bell; jacket spine very lightly faded with minor creasing at ends, some rubbing to rear panel.

First editions, the first being difficult to find in an acceptable dust-jacket, with only 1,250 copies printed and some of that number issued without the decorated boards.

Having been denied the Oxford education her male relatives were afforded, Virginia Woolf considered herself a self-taught reader. It is arguably her unaffected approach to literature—her insistence on the pleasure that ought to be drawn from reading—that renders her literary essays so sharp.

The common reader, Woolf observes in the present pages, "reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others." The very act of reading, and the necessity of literature, are things Woolf explored all her life. In her late essay, "The Leaning Tower" (1940), which addressed the "Auden Generation," she wrote: "It is thus that English literature will survive this war and cross the gulf—if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and write, how to preserve, and how to create" (154).

The Jacques Levy copies.

REFERENCES:

Kirkpatrick A8 (first issue binding), A18; Woolmer 81, 315

PROVENANCE:

Jacques Levy (his sale, Sotheby's New York, 20 April 2012, lot 373)