from Part IV - Public Bloomsbury
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2025
This chapter explores the significance of a bookshop set up in Bloomsbury in 1919 by the writers David Garnett and Francis Birrell. Drawing upon archival material at the Bodleian, Oxford – including catalogues, order histories, correspondence, and financial documents – it deepens and nuances the emerging understanding of modernist bookshops as private enterprises that were also public spaces of intellectual, artistic, and cultural exchange. The first part outlines the bookshop’s links with its Bloomsbury customers and, most notably, the Hogarth Press. The second part then turns to the international custom base and professional networks to show how the bookshop, like the Hogarth Press, challenges narratives of the Bloomsbury group as an insular clique. In considering how friendship and business mixed, the chapter therefore demonstrates two key features of modernist bookshops set out by Huw Osborne in his edited volume The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop (2015), whereby they exist “on the threshold of commerce and culture,” and where they are “locally fixed in cities and towns and yet tied into transatlantic and global networks” that complicate the very division between the local and the global.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.