Rebinding Woolf: an exploration of Virginia Woolf’s book designs through physical and digital archives

This article argues that Virginia Woolf’s bookbinding and book design should be understood as a sustained modernist practice of material authorship, not a peripheral hobby. Taking as its point of departure Woolf’s 1905 diary entry describing the rebinding of Eugénie Grandet, it shows how archival and digital infrastructures have preserved and amplified Woolf’s writing while leaving her craft labor illegible. Building on recent work in modernist craft studies and feminist materiality, the article returns to Woolf’s bindings as primary evidence, read across two archival environments: the Washington State University collection (which holds a larger corpus than is typically acknowledged) and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a digital repository that assembles and images Woolf’s rebound volumes and Hogarth Press ephemera. In tracing the recurrence of patterned papers, cut-and-pasted labels, and repair techniques across private and published books, the article repositions rebinding as a form of material authorship and feminist craft practice that troubles binaries of amateur/professional, domestic/commercial, and fine/non-fine labor.