First edition of The Waste Land published by Woolf’s Hogarth Press is sold to St Andrew’s University.
A rare UK first edition of TS Eliot‘s poem The Waste Land, hand-set by Virginia Woolf – who “had difficulty with the typography” – has been bought at auction by the University of St Andrews for £4,500 after being donated to Oxfam.
Woolf put out 460 copies of the poem in 1923 through Hogarth Press, the publisher that she and her husband Leonard had created to publish her writing.
“There was a lack of censorship to Hogarth Press, a feeling that they had the freedom to print what they wanted,” said Lydia Wilkinson, books specialist at auction house Bonhams, which handled the sale on behalf of Oxfam.
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