ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Publisher's original brown cloth ruled in blind and with triangular gilt decoration to the centre of the upper board, titles in gilt to the spine. Top edge gilt. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt bright and fresh, a little rubbed to spine tips. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owner's inscriptions or stamps.

Issued in a limited edition of 800 copies (with a further 50 copies published on pale green-tinted paper in black cloth), this example is numbered 304 and signed by James Joyce in black ink to the limitation page. A UK trade edition, published by Faber and Faber (and instigated by T. S. Eliot) was published in 1930. The novelist Edna O'Brien has described 'Anna Livia', which would become the eighth chapter of 'Finnegans Wake', as the "melodic chapter with which he hoped to win over recalcitrant readers. He wrote seven versions in all, constituting thousands of hours of labour, each episode more enriched, more exuberant and more transmutative. What he was doing was leaving a literary ghost mark for a world that was unprepared for it". ('The Guardian', 27 January 2017; Slocum & Cahoon A32).