In 1922, the Hogarth Press's fifth anniversary notice described its aims to subscribers as that of “producing works of genuine merit which…could scarcely hope to secure publication through the ordinary channels” (Lee 366). Ninety years later, McSweeney's has described itself as “a literary journal that published only works rejected by other magazines. Th at rule was soon abandoned, [but]…the journal continues to be a major home for new and unpublished writers; we're committed to publishing exciting fiction regardless of pedigree” (“McSweeney's”). With these announcements, the two presses overtly positioned themselves outside of the “ordinary channels” and as explicitly disinterested in prevailing notions of “pedigree.”

Why draw attention to the similarities between two author-run presses operating nearly a century apart? As this paper sets out to suggest, an extended comparative analysis of the Hogarth Press and McSweeney's could afford a number of interesting opportunities, namely: an opportunity to assess the afterlife of historical modernist values as embodied by the strategies that author-publishers have adopted both then and now; an opportunity to examine author-run presses as an expression of the writers’ conceptualization of readers; and an opportunity to explore whether recent work on “reading class” versus “reading culture,” as exemplified by sociologists such as Wendy Griswold, can afford literary critics a supplementary means of understanding the ongoing significance of adopting modernist modes of presenting value and prescribing frameworks of expectations. First, however, a little about how I arrived at this pairing.

In April 2011, Random House announced that they would be reviving the Hogarth imprint in Summer 2012. One year on, the website for this new Random House imprint foregrounds a continued commitment to what is described as the Woolfs’ “determination to publish the newest, most exciting writing” (Hogarth). Upon encountering this attempt by the publishing arm of a multi-national media corporation to leverage the lasting authorial value and the afterlife of historical modernism in order to hail a pre-existing audience—an audience that already has a set of associations with the imprimatur Hogarth—an (initially) unexpected name came to mind: Dave Eggers. Rather quickly a question began to formulate. Is McSweeney's a variation on the original Hogarth Press for a new generation of readers in a new century?