Nancy Cunard - The Hours Press

The Hours Press

In 1927, Cunard moved into a farmhouse in La Chapelle-Réanville, Normandy. It was there in 1928 that she set up the Hours Press. Previously the small press had been called Three Mountains Press and run by William Bird, an American journalist in Paris, who had published books by its editor from 1923, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams' The Great American Novel, Robert McAlmond and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. Cunard also wanted to support experimental poetry and provide a higher-paying market for young writers; her inherited wealth allowed her to take financial risks that other publishers could not. Hours Press became known for its beautiful book designs and high-quality production.

It brought out the first separately published work of Samuel Beckett, a poem called Whoroscope (1930) and also Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos. Cunard published old friends like George Moore, Norman Douglas, Richard Aldington, Arthur Symons and Henry-Music, a book of poems from various authors with music by Henry Crowder, but also two books by Laura Riding, The Collected Poems of John Rodker, poems by Roy Campbell, Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Walter Lowenfels and Words by Bob (Robert Carlton) Brown. By 1931 Wyn Henderson had taken over day-to-day operation of the press and in the same year it published its last book, The Revaluation of Obscenity by sexologist Havelock Ellis.