Joyce, James | Finnegans Wake

Joyce, James

Finnegans Wake. London: Faber & Faber / New York: Viking Press, 1939

8vo (250 x 150 mm). Partially unopened. Signed "James Joyce" in blue ink on the limitation page, half-title; leaves lightly toned, occasional stray spots. Publisher's cloth-covered boards, spine with gilt bands, spine label gilt-lettered, top edges gilt; boards with few minor stains and spots. In publishers card slipcase.

First edition, limited issue of Joyce's unparalleled modernist experiment—number 126 of 425 copies.

Joyce began writing this unparalleled modernist experiment in 1922, the same year that Ulysses was published. The title was taken from an Irish-American ballad (a party piece in the Joyce household) about the drunken bricklayer Tom Finnegan, who falls to his death from a ladder but returns to life when accidentally splashed with whisky at his wake.

"Joyce insisted that each word, each sentence had several meanings and that the 'ideal lecteur' should devote his lifetime to it, like the Koran" (Connolly, The Modern Movement, 110).

REFERENCES

Slocum and Cahoon A49; Connolly, The Modern Movement, 110.