Ulysses.

Paris: Shakespeare and Company,, 1922. One of the copies distributed by Harriet Shaw Weaver First edition, number 825 of 750 copies on handmade paper numbered 251 to 1,000. Sylvia Beach's notebook records that this copy was one of two dozen sold to "Miss Weaver (on sale)". Harriet Shaw Weaver was Joyce's indispensable patron, without whose munificent backing Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake might never have been published. As a measure of Weaver's paramount importance to Joyce, he inscribed copy number 1 of Ulysses to her. Ulysses was published in imitation of the traditional three-tiered French format aimed at both connoisseurs and readers: 100 signed copies on Dutch handmade paper; 150 large-paper copies printed on heavier vergé d'Arches, and 750 copies on vergé à barbes forming the smaller trade issue. The novel was published on 2 February 1922. Widely recognized as the key book of 20th-century English literature, Ulysses is among the major works in the modernist canon, and its creator one of the great geniuses of all literature: "Joyce, not to mince words, is Ireland's Shakespeare, its Goethe, its Racine, its Tolstoy" (John Sutherland). The book also proved to be a major test case for laws of freedom of expression. "Forced underground by censors... this was a cryptoclassic already before it was read, a subversive colossus" (Norman Sherry, James Joyce, Ulysses, 2nd edition). Small quarto. Original blue wrappers, titles to cover in white. Housed in a dark blue leather backed bookform box. Mild rubbing to extremities with some loss to wrappers around spine corners, some light soiling but the whole still fresh and attractive, and entirely untouched by restoration, very few trivial spots within, a very good copy indeed. Pencil ownership inscription to first blank of the veterinarian and James Joyce collector, Alfred T. Cowie (1916-2003), dated 1954. Slocum & Cahoon A17. Horowitz, Census, p. 131.