Stories of the East.

8vo (marg. foxing, offsetting to p. 27).

Publisher's binding: buff paper, front cover titled and illustrated in red by Dora Carrington, flat spine.

First edition. Edition limited to 300 unnumbered copies on Leonard and Virginia Woolf's hand-press. Leonard's successful book was written after he returned to Britain from Ceylon in 1911 and is composed of three short stories ("A tale told by moonlight", "Pearls and Swine" and "The two Brahmans"). V. & L. Woolf asked Dora Carrington, who had already illustrated their first work "Two Stories" in 1917, to create an illustration for the cover. She designed this tiger between palm trees, one of the most famous covers of the Hogarth Press. Leonard had some difficulty printing it as the woodcut was too big for their press and the paper unsuitable. The English painter and decorative artist Carrington (1893-1932) met Virginia & Leonard Woolf through her close friend Lytton Strachey. She was associated with the Bloomsbury Group, which gathered together English writers, philosophers, intellectuals and artists (including Virginia and Leonard Woolf). Includes a list of the Hogarth publications at the end.
Virginia & Leonard Woolf founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, the hand-press was installed in their house in Richmond. It grew during the interwar period from a hobby to a business when they started using commercial printers. From 1938, Virginia was no longer involved in the press, and Leonard then worked in partnership with John Lehman until 1946, when it became part of the "Chatto & Windus" company. The Hogarth Press published works of the Bloomsbury Group but also played an important role in printing psychoanalysis works and translations of foreign, especially Russian, books. "Without the imprimatur of Leonard and Virginia Woolf it is likely that The Hogarth Press would have attracted little attention from students of literature or bibliophiles" (Woolmer, p. xvii).
Ref. Woolmer, A checklist of the Hogarth Press 1917-1946, 16. - Ransom, Hogarth Press, 7.