A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. by JOYCE, James - 1917

London: Egoist Press, 1917. Inscribed to an early reviewer of Ulysses First edition to be printed in the UK, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title, "To George and Mary Slocombe, James Joyce, Paris 7. i. [1]926." Joyce's handwriting is shaky, understandable as he had undergone two painful eye operations in December 1925.
George Slocombe was an English journalist writing for the American papers. Joyce asked Sylvia Beach to send him a press copy of Ulysses, and he was among the first reviewers, telling the readers of the Daily Herald that it was "as large as a telephone directory or a family Bible, and with many of the literary and social characteristics of each".
Joyce's inscription usually appears on the front free endpaper; in this copy, however, that space was already taken by the ownership inscription of Allan Ross "Dougie" MacDougall (1893-1956), a gay expatriate Scotsman in Paris, friend, and later biographer, of Isadora Duncan. His inscription is dated 1921. It is not known how the copy came back into Joyce's hands for re-presentation.
Portrait was serialized in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and first published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York, from whom Harriet Shaw Weaver, proprietor of the Egoist Press, purchased and bound some 750 sets of the US sheets, issuing them in London under the Egoist imprint. This second edition is the first to be printed in Britain. Presentation copies of this printing are rare and examples with such intriguing Parisian provenance are exceptional. Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to front board in blind and to spine gilt. Housed in a dark green quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. Contents browned, spine cocked and faded, still very good. Slocum & Cahoon A12.