Ulysses.
$54,480 · Offered by Biblio
First edition · Signed
1922. Paris: Shakespeare and Company. 1922. 4to. Original blue wrappers, titles to cover in white; pp. 732, uncut; spine, hinges and extremities expertly repaired; a very good copy, housed in a custom quarter brown calf over blue cloth book form box, lettered in gilt to the spine; early bookplate 'Ex Libris Yester House' to front free endpaper (see below).First edition, number 442 of 750 copies on handmade paper numbered 251 to 1,000; the copy sold to the poet E. E. Cummings according to Sylvia Beach's records.'Ulysses is not a great novel in the sense of A la recherche du temps perdu. The characters do not develop. It 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 section, the middle parts of Bloom and the Nightown orgy and Molly's final reverie stand out like Gaudi's unfinished cathedral. The whole plan fails through Joyce's intellectual preference for language rather than people - yet 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, 100 Key Books of the Modern Movement).Cyril Connolly's judgement stands as a fair summation of this astonishing novel - discursive, baffling, funny, moving, a unique mingling of highbrow allusion and quotidian detail. It is as dazzling a display of stylistic virtuosity as has ever been attempted in prose, to the extent that it might n
- Year: 1922
- Edition: First Edition
- Binding: hardcover
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