Joyce James

1939 · Best.-Nr. 075 - 479 - 805 — First impression of Joyce's final novel in the original dust jacket Publisher and Year: London: Faber and Faber Limited 1939 Edition: First edition first impression trade issue. The publisher produced 3400 sets of sheets but bound only 2450 of them and destroyed the remaining 950. Original first-issue dust jacket retaining the price of 25s net on the bottom of the front flap. Released simultaneously with the signed limited edition Faber and Faber and the first American edition New York: The Viking Press. Slocum & Cahoon A47 Condition and Description: Quarto burgundy cloth stamped in blind and gilt yellow topstain edges uncut 628 pp. Clean cloth with trace handling marks only. Secure hinges and binding. Remains of pencil note to the front free endpaper. Tanning to the first and final blank leaves as usual owing to the acidity of the endpapers. Mild vertical crease to the preliminary leaves up until p. 7 and then a shorter crease to about p. 17. The notoriously fragile dust jacket has some nicks short tears and small chips to the extremities and spine ends; and two larger areas of loss to the rear panel. Preserved in an archival mylar cover. - "riverrun past Eve and Adam's" Finnegans Wake is James Joyce's final novel the culmination of seventeen years of experimentation that carried modernism to its outer limit. Conceived as a single night's dream encompassing all of human history it transforms the lives of a Dublin publican his wife and their children into an endlessly recursive myth of fall and renewal. Written in a polyglot language that fuses English with fragments from dozens of tongues the book compresses folklore theology and gossip into a dense musical weave that dissolves the boundaries between story song and history. Emerging after Ulysses as both its sequel and inversion Finnegans Wake rejected the realist novel entirely recasting fiction as a linguistic symphony meant to be heard as much as read. Its publication in 1939 divided critics and bewildered readers yet it soon became one of the central monuments of twentieth-century literature studied for its innovations in language structure and sound. Once dismissed as unreadable it has since shaped the methods of Beckett Burgess and Pynchon and remains unmatched in its ambition to encompass the whole of human speech within a single book. Inventory ID: 075 - 479 - 805 Faber and Faber Limited