MONDAY OR TUESDAY – Virginia Woolf
MONDAY OR TUESDAY – Virginia Woolf
MONDAY OR TUESDAY
by Virginia Woolf
(034)
Monday Or Tuesday was originally published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1921. Hogarth is one of the greatest continual inspirations for Two Plum Press– it is a great honor to bring one of these books back to life. The only Woolf short story collection published in her lifetime, when I first came upon a $1.95 Dover Thrift Editions copy of this book as-is (the stories have long been featured in anthologies, but I’d never ever heard of the collection as a stand alone work), I was immediately besotted with it.
The way it fit into the Two Plum Press format was uncanny. This edition is the first since the original publication to feature woodcut illustrations for “A String Quartet” by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell.
“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
20s / 20s
20s / 20s is a series of classic slim volume works, published by Two Plum Press in the 2020s. Works featured in the series were originally published in the 1920s and have newly entered the public domain. 20s / 20s is an opportunity for the press to share favorite works by favorite authors of the past, and to uncover lost classics along the way. Placing these works side by side with the press’s contemporary titles is an intentional way to glance back 100 years and to feel the enduring magic of the small book.
(excerpt)
monday or tuesday
LAZY AND INDIFFERENT, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect–the sun gold on its slopes. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever–
Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring–(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)–for ever desiring–(the clock asseverates with twelve dis- tinct strokes that it is mid-day; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)–for ever desiring truth. Red is the dome; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry “Iron for sale”–and truth?
Radiating to a point men’s feet and women’s feet, black or gold-encrusted–(This foggy weather–Sugar? No, thank you–The commonwealth of the future)–the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black figures and their bright eyes, while outside a van discharges, Miss Thingummy drinks tea at her desk, and plate-glass preserves fur coats–
Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled–and truth?
Now to recollect by the fireside on the white square of marble. From ivory depths words rising shed their blackness, blossom and penetrate. Fallen the book; in the flame, in the smoke, in the momentary sparks–or now voyaging, the marble square pendant, minarets beneath and the Indian seas, while space rushes blue and stars glint–truth? or now, content with closeness?
Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them.
