James Joyce’s Ulysses was published at Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company on 2 February 1922. One hundred years later, the book is still fascinating and maddening readers around the world, and the first edition occupies a central place in any modernist collector’s ideal bookshelf. Edmund Wilson, in his 1931 appraisal of the modernist movement Axel’s Castle , already understood that with Ulysses Joyce had created something for all time: “The world of Ulysses is animated by a complex inexhaustible life: we revisit it as we do a city . . . And when we reread it, we start in at any point, as if it were indeed something solid like a city which actually existed in space and which could be entered in any direction”. Though it may exhaust some readers, the text itself remains inexhaustible. We keep returning to Ulysses because, like all great works of literature, it abides as a source of ever renewable energy. Not one but three first editions of Ulysses feature here (items 45–47), one of each issue, including the coveted one-of-100 signed by Joyce, all three in the original blue wrappers. We have Joyce’s earliest obtainable publication, “The Day of the Rabblement” (41), a mischievous article printed while still a student in Dublin, alongside inscribed copies of Dubliners (43, one of the very first he handled) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (44, inscribed to a reviewer of Ulysses ). Two significant translations of Ulysses also appear: the French in a copy inscribed by Joyce to his favourite tenor (48), and the Japanese (49), inscribed by the translator Ito Sei who has added the censored Molly Bloom soliloquy back into this copy. This 100 item catalogue takes the centenary as an opportunity also to celebrate the remarkable number of other modernist masterpieces that were published or written in 1922. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land first appeared in October 1922 in the debut issue of The Criterion : we have the publisher’s own copy, included among a rare complete run of the
magazine (23). The first edition as a standalone book, published in New York later that same year, is another keystone for literature collectors, and we are pleased to have one surviving in fine condition in jacket and glassine (24). Other highlights from this literary annus mirabilis include: Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (one of forty special advance copies signed for subscribers, 95); Edna St Vincent Millay’s Ballad of the Harp Weaver , which won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize (one of only five copies printed on japon, and signed, 73); Edith Sitwell’s Façade , which she recited to a shocked audience through a megaphone (Sitwell’s own copy, 88); and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (86), which the poet completed in a “savage creative storm” in the same month that Ulysses was hitting the shelves in Paris. The creative explosion between the wars certainly had Paris as its hotspot, featuring extraordinary characters like the “amazon” salonnière Natalie Clifford Barney (1) or the wild Harry and Caresse Crosby of the Black Sun Press (18–20, 53). Further bold expatriate publishers were Robert McAlmon of Contact Editions (2, 12, 34, 64, 65), and of course Sylvia Beach (2, 51). Beyond Paris, modernist experiments and breakthroughs were occurring worldwide, bringing into the story writers as disparate as Bulgakov (9) in Russia, Cavafy (14) in Alexandria, and even Borges (5) and García Lorca (63) in Buenos Aires. February is here – Eliot’s April is not far off. I hope this collection inspires, “mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain”.
Sammy Jay sammy@peterharrington.co.uk
Front cover image: Sylvia Beach in the doorway of her bookshop in 1921 Design: Nigel Bents Photography: Ruth Segarra Additional photography: Nigel Robinson Rear cover image of Sammy Jay, Literature Specialist: Diandra Galia
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