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JOYCE, James.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
First edition, first printing. A superb example of one of the legendary rarities of twentieth-century literature. Due at least in part to the adverse reception of the Egoist serialization of A Portrait, no English printer would print the book for fear of prosecution under the obscenity laws. So it was Huebsch that undertook the first publication. He also sent from this print run about 750 sets of sheets for issue in the UK in February 1917. While the number of copies issued in America is undetermined, the number cannot have been large since he had sold out by March and called for a second printing by April. Although by no means scarce in poor condition in cloth, copies in any sort of jacket at all are rare. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's first novel and introduces to the world one of the two key characters in Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus was created by the author as a kind of doppelganger - the author as he would have been had he not left Ireland in 1904. Its opening sentence alone redefined what a novel could be. We notice that the blurb on the upper panel of this jacket describes the book in earnest terms absolutely at odds with what the book itself was doing. The blurb appears nowhere else.
Octavo. Original blue linen, titles to upper board in blind and to spine gilt. With the dust jacket. In a quarter blue morocco box. An exceptional copy in the little tanned and frayed dust jacket with a single piece of internal strengthening and a minor loss a the ends of the spine panel and one corner.
