Finnegans Wake

Limited first edition. The Deluxe issue. Tall 8vo. Pp. [viii], 628. Brick-red buckram, titles to spine gilt, t.e.g., others untrimmed. Copy #207 of 425 numbered copies, specially printed and bound on wove paper, and signed by the author in green ink on the limitation page. Published simultaneously in the UK and US, on May 4, 1939, and bearing Faber and Viking's joint imprint.

Lacking the publisher's yellow cloth slipcase. Scattered foxing to preliminaries; with signature of noted Joyce collector, Dr Peter Hopkinson, on front flypaper. A fine copy.

Finnegans Wake was begun in 1922, with individual sections published as Work in Progress during the seventeen years of its composition in literary journals, such as Transatlantic Review and Eugene Jolas's transition. A phantasmagorical dreamscape and 'a great comic vision', drawing upon an encyclopaedic range of literary allusions, polyglot puns and portmanteau words forged on an ingenious frame of English vocabulary and syntax, and intended to convey the fluidity of the conscious and the unconscious self during our nocturnal state.

It interweaves Irish language and mythology on a skeletal storyline of a publican, his wife, and their three children, with the city of Dublin and the river Liffey both featured as integral characters, and utilises a circular plot structure inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico's idea that history is cyclic. Aptly illustrating the latter, the novel begins mid-sentence, completing the first half of one left hanging mid-air at the end of the book.

"Joyce insisted that each word, each sentence had several meanings and that the 'idéal lecteur' should devote his life-time to it, like the Koran." (Connolly, The Modern Movement, 87).

[Slocum & Cahoon A49; Burgess, 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, p. 25]