The Waste Land, inscribed by Eliot to John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), and with Eliot’s autograph corrections

Intrigued by the poem from the first time T.S. Eliot read it aloud to her in the summer of 1922, Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, agreed to publish The Waste Land in book form through their Hogarth Press. Virginia set the type herself, while Leonard performed the manual labor of printing. The edition of approximately 460 copies was bound in simple covered boards of blue marbled paper. Eliot inscribed this copy to his friend, the editor and critic John Middleton Murry.