May 12, 2011 - Sale 2247

Sale 2247 - Lot 286

Price Realized: $ 3,120
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
JOYCE, JAMES. Ulysses [as published in Two Worlds Monthly]. Volume 1, number 1 through Volume 3, number 3 (complete). Together, 11 volumes: includes 10 issues containing the work, and a final installment containing editor Samuel Roth's "An Offer to James Joyce." 8vo, publisher's printed wrappers, minor wear includes some scattered rubbing along spines and edges with minimal occasional loss. New York, 1926-27

Additional Details

Scarce piratical first appearance in America of Joyce's masterpiece. The New York editor, bookseller and publisher of avant-garde literature first became associated with Joyce in 1925 when he published (also without Joyce's stated permission), five fragments from Joyce's current Work in Progress in his magazine, Two Worlds. When his new magazine Two Worlds Monthly was launched the next year, Roth printed these unauthorized and expurgated chapters from Ulysses that included several textual mistakes as well. Joyce and his publisher of the First Paris Edition of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach, initiated immediate legal action against Roth who lied about a printing arrangement with Joyce. It sparked a world-wide sensation in literary and intellectual circles, resulting in a printed protest against Roth signed by 167 prominent writers, artists, and thinkers, including T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and Albert Einstein. Joyce sued Roth for this publication charging that he had not given permission and that the text had been altered. Slocum & Cahoon pages 28-29.