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75 JOYCE, James, Samuel Beckett, & others. Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1929 “Who is Sylvia? What is she, that all our scribes commend her” First edition, first printing, the copy of John B. Sanford, “perhaps the most outstanding neglected [Jewish-American] novelist [who] blended experimental techniques with realism” (Wald, p. 179), with his embossed name stamp and ink ownership inscription with his given name, “Julian L. Shapiro Madrid – April 4th 1931” on the front free endpaper. In his autobiography, Sanford reminisces on his memory of Beach at the Parisian bookshop, Shakespeare and Company: “if she’d glanced at the windows, she’d have made out little through the vapour on the panes and the vapourous rain outside . . . she’d not have noted one of the many passer-by, seen him stop before the bookshop, and look down at a propped-up copy of Ulysses . . . she was unaware when the shape moved and came inside. If it drifted past her, if it asked a question and got a reply, if it paused to gaze . . . she hardly knew it was there, never knew it had gone” ( Colour of Air , p. 80). Sanford was evidently a great admirer; Beach is given a chapter in his Book of American Women (1975), introduced by Joyce’s quote: “Who is Sylvia? What is she, that all our scribes commend her”. Sanford (1904–2003) was a prolific screenwriter and author, who wrote half of his books after the age of 80. For his five volume autobiography, The Color of Air , he received a PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Lifetime Achievement Award. William Carlos Williams, who contributes to this volume, described Sanford’s masterpiece The People From Heaven (1943) as “the most important book of fiction published here in the last 20 years” (quoted in Rutton). This early critique of Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake , was published by Shakespeare and Company some ten years prior to the publication of the finished novel; part of the incentive to publish was apparently to raise funds for the perennially

impecunious Joyce. The first article, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico … Joyce”, is by Samuel Beckett, and marks his first appearance in print. Other contributors include Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, and the aforementioned William Carlos Williams. The publishers later sold sheets of this edition to Faber & Faber in London and New Directions in New York, who reissued them with inserted title pages, but this copy is of the original Paris issue. Octavo. Original white wrappers printed in black. Housed in a custom black quarter morocco and marbled paper solander box. Short closed tear to head of front joint, small tape repair to foot, extremities nicked, couple of spots of foxing, wrappers and contents toned but clean. A very good copy indeed of this fragile publication. ¶ Tim Rutten, “Sanford’s originality came through to the end”, Los Angeles Times , 8 March 2003; John B. Sanford, The Color of Air , vol. 1, 1986; Alan Wald, “Jewish American Writers on the Left”, The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , 2003. £1,250 [155371] 76 KEROUAC, Jack. On the Road. New York: The Viking Press, 1957 The copy of Kerouac’s “faust”, the model for Sylvester Strauss in The Subterraneans First edition, first printing, association copy, with a contemporary gift inscription to American composer David Diamond, who appeared in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (1958) as Sylvester Straus, on the front free endpaper, “Dear David – Merry Christmas, & have a wonderfully rewarding, rich New Year – love, Ed, Xmas, 1957”. Kerouac’s first meeting with the “notorious gossip” David Diamond went well but the friendship soured when Diamond managed to insult Kerouac. “Beneath the phrasing of Diamond’s ‘insults’, [Kerouac] heard a message that struck at what little sense of belonging he had recently acquired – the implication that a Canuck like Jack Kerouac could be welcomed into David Diamond’s rarefied world of elegant and supposedly mature

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