House of the Seven Gables [Association: Virginia Woolf]

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London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, (1924).

Duodecimo, 9.5 x 15.5 cm. x,394pp,[ii],8pp ads.

Association copy: this book was hand-bound by Virginia Woolf for her nephew, Julian Bell. Bound with a blue cloth spine and patterned paper over boards, with a paper spine label hand-lettered by Virginia Woolf. Julian Bell's copy, with his signature on the front free endpaper. Housed in a custom cloth Solander box with a gilt-stamped morocco spine label.

Binding exterior significantly faded and toned, extremities slightly worn. Offsetting to the free endpapers from the turn-ins, offsetting from Bell's signature to the front paste-down. Very good condition.

This edition was published as number CCLXXIII of "The World's Classics" series.

Virginia Woolf pursued bookbinding as a form of therapeutic recreation. Starting in October 1901, she began taking occasional bookbinding lessons from Sylvia Stebbing. The results, while not technically adept, reflect a love for the book form and a simple enjoyment derived from handicraft. In May 1902, fewer than six months after her first lesson, she wrote to her brother Thoby to report, "I am really rather a good binder." The majority of Virginia Woolf's bindings are conserved in the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Washington State University, and examples available for purchase are exceedingly uncommon.

Poet Julian Bell, the son of Virginia's older sister Vanessa and the brother of writer Quentin Bell, was an English teacher at Wuhan University in China starting in 1935. Bell then left his teaching position to serve as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War and was killed at the Battle of Brunete in 1937.

This copy was offered for sale by Glenn Horowitz in 2002. Prior to that, it belonged to Tony Bradshaw, owner of The Bloomsbury Workshop, a London art gallery and bookshop that specializes in work from the Bloomsbury Group. Included with the purchase of this book is a copy of the 24-page pamphlet by Alan Isaac entitled Virginia Woolf, the Uncommon Bookbinder (London: Cecil Woolf, 2000) which lists this copy in its conspectus and offers additional insight into Virginia Woolf's efforts as an amateur bookbinder.

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