On Monday, 30 September 1929, readers of the Aberdeen Press and Journal came across a short article entitled ‘Virginia Woolf “Collected”’. The Hogarth Press had just started publishing a ‘charming’ Uniform Edition at five shillings a volume. ‘Of pocket size, tastefully produced in green, and clearly printed, this edition is a model of what such reprints should be’, declared the newspaper. Readers were encouraged to buy Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway, which had their place among the ‘leading fiction of our day’, as well as The Common Reader, a book with passages ‘of great beauty and insight’.

The Uniform Edition was a new step in Woolf's campaign to reach ordinary readers – including readers based in Aberdeen and other cities far from the literary centres of southern England. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Woolf was already a well-known writer in the late 1920s, a writer whose name could boost the sales of titles in cheap series of reprints. She was also determined to expand her readership on both sides of the Atlantic. But there was one hurdle on the way to a greater audience: the price and availability of her own books. The Hogarth Press had given Woolf exceptional creative freedom (‘I'm the only woman in England free to write what I like’, she declared in 1925. ‘The others must be thinking of series & editors’). But it had also tied her – at least initially – to the sphere of small presses with limited market opportunities. Between 1919 and 1923, books were available by subscription: ‘A’ subscribers received all publications in exchange for a deposit of ￡1; ‘B’ subscribers ordered and paid for only specific works. When Jacob's Room was first published in 1922, its audience was restricted to a relatively small readership already familiar with Woolf and her press. Three years later, Mrs Dalloway had a first printing of 2,000 copies and sold for seven shillings and six pence. By 1929, both novels were out of print. The Uniform Edition gave new life to Woolf's titles: they were now advertised in major newspapers and available in bookstores for a reasonable price. As J. H. Willis puts it, the Uniform Edition ‘marked one more stage in the evolution of the Hogarth Press into a commercial publishing house’.