‘A Most Goddamn Wonderful Book’ (Hemingway)
JOYCE, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company. 1925.
4to. Twentieth-century morocco-backed boards with marbled sides, spine lettered directly in gilt, marbled endpapers, green place-marker; pp. [vi], [1 (blank)], 736; joints subtly re-stored, slight wear to corners; lightly toned, sporadic light foxing, small loss to upper cor-ner of pp. 715–16, affecting pagination & a single letter of text.
First edition, sixth printing, of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece.
This was the penultimate printing from the original setting of type before the 1926 reset. Ulysses ‘has no consistent tragic grandeur and bogs down in several stylistic exercises which have nothing to do with the novel proper; yet the early Dedalus sections, the middle parts of Bloom and the Nightown orgy and Molly’s final reverie stand out like Gaudi’s unfin-ished cathedral [...] somehow it does achieve greatness like a ruined temple soaring from a jungle – and should be judged perhaps as a poem, a festival of the imagination’ (Connolly).
Slocum & Cahoon A17 (see p. 25 for sixth printing); see Connolly 42.
SKU: 2124640