Ulysses
Price: $275.00
Hard Cover. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1958. First Unlimited Edition. Very Good / Dust Jacket Included.
First unlimited edition, eighth printing ('Cheap Edition" to dust jacket flap). Publisher's green cloth with the Homeric bow device designed by Eric Gill stamped in blind to front board, spine lettered in gilt; in the original pale green dust jacket lettered in black with the Homeric bow on the spine, with an advertisement for James Joyce by Herbert Gorman on the rear panel. Very good book, with moderate spotting to first few pages and edges of text block, boards square and spine bright; very good or better unclipped dust jacket, with top edge lightly worn, upper and lower edges of flaps somewhat faded, and very faint spotting to right edge of front panel, barely noticeable. Overall, a crisp and bright copy of Joyce's masterpiece. Considered one of the most important works of Modernist literature, Ulysses was first published serially in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, at which time copies of the magazine were seized and the magazine's publishers were taken to trial due to the sexually explicit nature of the novel. Because of the controversy surrounding Ulysses, Joyce was unable to find a publisher for the book until his friend Sylvia Beach, the American owner of Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, agreed to publish it. The stream-of-consciousness novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus through Dublin on an ordinary day (June 16, 1904-notably the same day that Joyce first went on a date with Nora Barnacle, who would later become his wife). The book is heavily fragmented and allusive, with a structure that loosely parallels Homer's The Odyssey. Regarding the book's complexity, Joyce said, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of ensuring one's immortality." Item #JJ048
