A Unique Volume
Here is a book with a fascinating history and provenance. An exciting association copy, signed by three of the, then, surviving original authors of essays contained within the volume, these being, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion and Frank Budgen.
In addition this particular edition contains a new Introduction by the original publisher and owner of Shakespeare and Company SYLVIA BEACH and this unique volume is also finely SIGNED by her at the head of the chapter, a clear signature with a couple of small ink blots below.
An important collection of essays on James Joyce (the title having been taken from Finnegans Wake). Originally published by Shakespeare and Company in 1929, they sold sheets to Faber & Faber, who then inserted their own title-page. This 1961 UK printing by Faber includes the new Sylvia Beach “Introduction”. The book consists of 12 studies of the published instalments of the experimental ‘Work in Progress’ which was to become (then as yet unpublished) ‘Finnegans Wake’. Those writers were Samuel Beckett [his first appearance in print], Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, and William Carlos Williams.
This particular copy has a good provenance from the library of linguist David Enderton Johnson and with his typographic bookplate to front pastedown concealed by d/w flap. Johnson is best known for his work on relational grammar, especially the development with Paul Postal in 1977 of arc pair grammar. Altogether an enthralling association copy with elusive signatures, bringing together significant figures of 20th century literature.
Samuel Barclay Beckett 1906 –1989) the Irish novelist, Marcel Brion 1895 -1984 was the French essayist, Frank Spencer Curtis Budgen 1882 –1971 English painter and writer and of course Sylvia Beach 1887 –1962), best known for her Paris bookstore, where she published James Joyce’s controversial book, Ulysses in 1922, and encouraged a legion of literary figures of the 20th century. She told her own story in “Shakespeare and Company” first published in 1959.
