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Richard Kennedy went to work for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their embryonic Hogarth Press in 1926, at the age of sixteen. He had no qualifications—indeed his very lack of them had caused his Uncle George to ask his friend Leonard Woolf if he could find employment for his young nephew. Thus was Richard propelled into the strange, incestuous rock pool of Bloomsbury life, and the illustrated diary he put together forty years later gives us a vivid picture of its inhabitants and their eccentric ways.
The genesis of A Boy at the Hogarth
Press is inextricably bound up with the beginnings of the
Whittington Press. Meeting Richard in 1964, when I had just started my
first job as production assistant at the small but typographically
distinguished London publishing house of Ernest Benn, was the catalyst
that six years later brought into focus some hazy notions of starting a
hand-press in the country and printing one's own books in the way one
wished. Richard had come in with a portfolio of drawings for a series of
remedial readers we were doing. I was immediately struck by the somewhat
distracted air of the artist, but even more so by the fluidity and
sureness of line in We found we had certain experiences in common. We had both been educated (neither of us very successfully) at Marlborough College, a boys' boarding school in Wiltshire run on distinctly traditional lines. His father had been killed in France during the First World War when Richard was four, mine in the next war on the India/Burma border when I was two. Chatting over a glass of beer one lunchtime, Richard told me of his time at the Hogarth Press—how the drains smelt at Rodmell, the Woolfs' Sussex cottage, how Virginia rolled her own cigarettes, and how Leonard was in the habit of 'withering' his long-suffering secretary, Mrs Cartwright. It was a refreshing antidote to the more serious studies of Bloomsbury then beginning to proliferate, and I told Richard he really should write it all down. It was not until some years later that he finally put pen to paper. The manuscript for A Boy at the Hogarth
Press came just at the time my fiancée, Rose, and I were
making plans to start a press in the Cotswold village of Whittington. Her
first task was to sort out Richard's intriguingly holistic manuscript (now
at the University of Minnesota), in which the illustrations often blended
tantalisingly with the text. We printed the book in 1972, over a year of
weekends of escape from publishing jobs in London, on an 1848 Columbian
hand-press. It was set in 12-point Caslon type from Stephenson Blake, the
last of the English type founders. It all brought back happy memories of
the school press at Marlborough, where twelve years A Boy at the Hogarth Press turned out to be a minor classic, and established Richard as one of a handful of writer-illustrators who could successfully combine both disciplines within one book. Richard himself was something of a surrogate father to the Whittington Press. Not only did he get us off to a flying start by providing a best seller for our first book, but he was a constant source of stimulus in other ways, as with the manner in which he set about illustrating a book. Unlike most artists, he would send along a mass of
drawings, or 'rushes' as he would call them, seeing himself as the
cameraman and the publisher as the scissor-wielding director who would
trim out the bits to be used. In this way maximum harmony could be
achieved between text and Richard died in 1989. He was a man of great humanity and kindness, with a strong sense of the injustices of life suffered by the less privileged. He also had a rare talent for friendship. Many will be grateful to him for the encouragement he so often gave to their own projects, and for his complete openness of mind, perhaps in part a legacy from his Bloomsbury days. ### John Randle Co-founder of the Whittington Press © 2006 John Randle. Excerpted from his introduction to the Levenger Press edition of A Boy at the Hogarth Press. 
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Editor's Note: If you have seen the 
As a fly on the wall in the
basement at Tavistock Square, the Woolfs' London home where they ran their
Hogarth Press, Richard made the tea, printed book-jackets on the treadle
press, and helped Virginia to set type. He was of no consequence to the
mandarins of Bloomsbury, hence they took little notice of him. Yet his
apparently vague exterior hid an acute observation and a memory unusually
retentive of dialogue and detail. 
his drawings. Although he never seemed to size up
his drawings accurately, after reduction they miraculously always fitted
the allotted space exactly.
earlier I
had first become fascinated with the processes of setting type and
printing on a hand-press.
illustration. With Richard's help we broke out of the constraints of the type margin and allowed his
wonderfully fluid line to wander all over the page.