JOYCE, James.. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.. London: Egoist Press, 1917, 1917.

Price: US$35382.81 + shipping

Description: First edition to be printed in Britain, inscribed by the author, "To George and Mary Slocombe, James Joyce, Paris 7. i. [1]926" on the half-title. George Slocombe was an English journalist writing for the American papers. Joyce asked Sylvia Beach to send him a press copy of Ulysses, and he was among its first reviewers, telling the readers of the Daily Herald that it was "as large as a telephone directory or a family Bible, and with many of the literary and social characteristics of each". Joyce's inscriptions usually appear on the front free endpaper; in this copy, however, that space was already taken by the ownership inscription, dated and located "Paris 1921" of Allan Ross "Dougie" MacDougall (1893-1956), a gay expatriate Scotsman in Paris, friend, and later biographer, of Isadora Duncan. In the early 1920s MacDougall had a regular column in the Chicago Tribune and he and Slocombe shared a close mutual friend in Edna St Vincent Millay. Presumably MacDougall gave the book to Slocombe, who then asked Joyce to inscribe it. Portrait was serialized in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and first published as a book in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch of New York, from whom Harriet Shaw Weaver, proprietor of the Egoist Press, purchased and bound some 750 sets of the US sheets, issuing them in London under the Egoist imprint. This second edition is the first to be printed in Britain. Presentation copies of this printing are rare and examples with such intriguing Parisian provenance are exceptional. Slocum & Cahoon A12. Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to front board in blind and to spine in white. Housed in a navy blue morocco backed bookform folding case by the Chelsea Bindery. Spine heavily toned and somewhat rolled, some toning around margins within, but still a sound copy in good condition.

Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom