Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse famously opens with six-year old James Ramsay, “sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army & Navy Stores.” With the awkward dexterity of a young child, James carefully guides his scissors around “a picture of a refrigerator,” endowing the image “with heavenly bliss” under the loving but watchful gaze of his mother. The scene has long captured critical attention, but less so the consumerist allusion to a popular shop on the book’s first page. The Army & Navy Stores was a well-known London department store, over a quarter-century old by the time James shreds its marquee catalogue. Founded in 1871 as an officer’s cooperative, the shop supplied domestic commodities at reduced rates, including books priced at a twenty-five percent discount. By February 1872, it added a grocery wing and moved into stationery, drapery, and tailoring, with a chemist’s shop and a gun department. Catalogues propelled its products far and wide, not just to the fictional Hebrides but also to outlets in Paris, Leipzig, Plymouth, and Mumbai, until its global brand receded after 1945. Today, it is no longer possible to shop at the Army & Navy Stores at 103 Victoria Street, London. For modernist scholars and book historians, however, its unexpected role—not just as an obscure historical allusion in Woolf’s fiction, but also as a contemporary bookseller of Woolf’s own publications—is becoming newly visible, appearing as one shop name, nested amongst hundreds of others, in the holographic sales ledgers of Woolf’s private press, The Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 (fig. 1).
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book culture
publishing
Virginia Woolf
