25 “His Soul Swooned Slowly As He Heard The Snow Falling Faintly Through The Universe And Faintly Falling, Like The Descent Of Their Last End, Upon All The Living And The Dead” 24 JOYCE, James. Dubliners. London, 1914. Octavo, original dark red cloth, custom slipcase, half morocco clamshell box. $28,000 Rare first edition, one of only 1250 copies printed. This collection includes some of the finest stories written in the English language, including the classic “The Dead.” One of no more than 764 copies printed (and perhaps as few as 246). Only 1250 sets of sheets were printed for the first edition and 504 of those sets were sold to the New York publisher B.W. Huebsch in 1916 for the first American edition. “It has also been reported that in 1915 Grant Richards sold without Joyce’s knowledge 500 sets of [the original 1250] Dubliners sheets to Albert and Charles Boni of New York… A new title page was prepared for the New York imprint, and 499 copies were shipped to New York on the S.S. Arabic which was torpedoed in August 1915. All copies were lost except one which Albert Boni kept in his personal possession” (Slocum & Cahoon A8). Thus, of the original 1250 sets of sheets, 504 are known to have been sold for the American edition and 499 are thought to be at the bottom of the sea. Without exceedingly rare original dust jacket. Only a few scattered spots of foxing, cloth exceptional. A beautiful copy. “To Forge In The Smithy Of My Soul The Uncreated Conscience Of My Race” 25 JOYCE, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York, 1916. Octavo, original blue cloth, custom clamshell box. $14,000 First edition of Joyce’s classic stream-of-consciousness work, published in New York against numerous attempts to remove “offending passages”—a defining moment in the history of free expression and the emergence of the modern novel. A lovely copy. New York publisher B.W. Huebsch was the only publisher “venturesome enough in 1916 to publish Joyce’s [novel] unexpurgated… In England, 12 publishers had refused to set [it] up the way Joyce wrote it, and Harriet Weaver, who had published parts of the work serially in her avant-garde magazine The Egoist, would not go along with Ezra Pound’s proposal that blank spaces be left and, after printing, the offending passages be filled in with a typewriter. The difficulty was exacerbated because, as everyone knew, only a year earlier, in England, the entire edition of D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow had been destroyed by the police. Publishers and printers on both sides of the Atlantic were intimidated” (de Grazia, 18). The novel was not published in England until 1917. Without extraordinarily rare dust jacket. Slocum & Cahoon A11. Interior fine. Only very minor rubbing to spine ends. An about-fine copy of this classic. Scarce.
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