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).

In 2000, the Indian artist Vivan Sundaram made a portrait of the critic Geeta Kapur’s bookshelf titled Marxism in the Expanded Field ( MEF, fig.1). Framed and sectioned by a beaten band of tape spelling a famous line from the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air,” and executed nearly a decade after India’s neo-liberal reforms of 1991, MEF documents a suddenly precarious twentieth-century landscape: the aesthetics and politics of international Marxism

Nancy Cunard began printing alone in 1927—in a heat wave no less, as she notes in her posthumously published memoir, These Were the Hours (1969)—and struggled her way through the difficult early stages of learning how to make serviceable prints on an Albion press. [1] She quickly realized, however, that she would need help if the Hours Press were ever to become a successful small publishing house. In 1928, she therefore initiated her well-known collaboration with her lover, the jazz musician Henry Crowder, turning the printing room into a space where, as Jeremy Braddock has recently argued, “Cunard’s advocacy of radical race politics” was often perceived by others as working “in concert with the open publicizing of her own romantic relationships with black men.” [2]

There is always some degree of confusion when I tell people that I am getting my PhD in English by writing a dissertation about wordless novels. While I’m used to giving my “elevator pitch” to fellow academics, describing my project to people outside of academia can be more of a challenge: