Ulysses

Limited first edition thus. Large quarto. Pp. xv, [3], 363, [1 (blank)], [1 (colophon)], [5 (blank)]. With an Introduction by Stuart Gilbert and Illustrations by Henri Matisse, depicting the Calypso, Aeolus, Cyclops, Nausicaa, Circe, and Ithaca episodes. Publisher's brown Bancroft buckram with front cover design by LeRoy H. Appleton, embossed in gilt bas-relief and repeating motif amidst script lettering gilt stamped on spine. With six, hand-printed, soft-ground etchings by Matisse; his only efforts in the medium. Also bound in are 20 preliminary lithographic studies, printed on blue and yellow paper. Top edge speckled brown, others untrimmed. Printed in double columns on toned cream-white rag paper. One of fifteen hundred numbered copies, signed by the artist on the colophon, and produced for members of the Limited Editions Club.

Whilst the original intention was for Joyce to co-sign all impressions of the edition, he ended up signing a mere 250. Reasons advanced include, possible strain on his notoriously bad eyesight and taking offence in the fact that Matisse had illustrated Homer's Odyssey rather than his. Despite consulting Stuart Gilbert's French translation, the artist was reportedly "befogged" about Joyce's creation. However, Joyce must have been pleased enough with Matisse's illustrative efforts for he bought a number of copies for himself, even presenting one to his son and daughter-in-law as a Christmas present in 1935.

Copies bearing Joyce's signature were sold to the original club members at a 50% premium and were oversubscribed. The ever-spendthrift and impecunious author had negotiated terms with publisher George Macy for both a one-off text reproduction and for each signature he scribbled. The text utilises the second impression of the Odyssey Press edition (October 1933), "generally considered to be the most accurate and authoritative text". One of the very few pre-World War II American livres de peintres.

Very fine in a glassine dustwrapper (chipped but intact). Lacking the original slipcase.

The pinnacle of the Modernist movement. Originally conceived as an additional short story for Dubliners (1914), the constantly evolving torrent of ideas and allusions Joyce eventually incorporated on a skeleton structure of Homer's Odyssey, with its radical shifts in narrative style, and a legerdemain stream-of-consciousness technique, both subverted mainstream notions of plot, setting, and character portrayal and opened up new avenues for writers to explore. The storyline picks up Stephen Dedalus's life subsequent to events depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), with the character's peregrinations around the city of Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904, serving as the plot.

The novel's long gestation period (1914 – 1921) meant that successive chapters were first serialized in The Little Review (March 1918 – December 1920), before eventual publication by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. In 1998, Modern Library ranked Ulysses top of its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

"[A] book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape". –T.S. Eliot, "'Ulysses,' Order, and Myth", The Dial (Nov 1923)

[LEC Bibliography 71; The American Livre de Peintre, 32; The Artist and the Book, 197; Slocum & Cahoon A22]