Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
JOYCE, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.
Price: US$1750.00 + shipping
Description: First American Edition. Thick octavo. The final state of Joyce's long-gestating "Work in Progress," published in the same year as the signed Limited Edition co-published by Viking with Faber & Faber. Navy blue cloth boards with gilt lettering to front panel and spine and turqoise topstain; minor scuffing to textblock edges, else near fine. In unclipped typographic jacket, with some scuffing and light creasing at edges, with minor chipping to lower edge of front panel; thus close to near fine. A pleasing copy.
Seller: Harper's Books, ABAA, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Viking Press (1939), New York, 1939.
Price: US$12500.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: 628p octavo a fine copy in a very good dust jacket. Purchased by James Joyce in Zurich in the summer of 1939, and subsequently sent by him from Brittany to a friend in Zurich. (The return address label in green ink in Joyce's hand is affixed to the rear pastedown: "Envoi de: J. Joyce/hotel saint cristophe/la baule"). Finnegans Wake was published simultaneously in London and New York on 4 May 1939, entering the stock of the Zurich bookseller Kurt Staheli & Co. on Bahnhofstrasse on June 20(pencil note recording its entry on lower pastedown); acquired by Joyce whilst in Zurich in August 1939. Joyce then moved to the Hotel Schweizerhof, Berne, from 14-20 August, before traveling to La Baule in Brittany on 28 August, where he stayed at the Hotel Saint-Christophe from 2 September until 15 October [See Ellman, Letters Volume 2 p. lxii]; sent by Joyce during his stay at the Hotel Saint-Christophe to an unnamed recipient in Zurich (remains of a return address label affixed to the pastedown); acquiredby the Swiss Joycean Armin Kesser; sold by the Zurich antiquariat Hans Bollinger Catalogue 7, item 366. Source: PBA Galleries, Fine and Rare Books -June 14, 2007
Seller: Old New York Book Shop, ABAA, Atlanta, GA, U.S.A.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Faber & Faber Limited & The Viking Press, London & New York, 1939.
Price: US$15500.00 + shipping
Description: 628 pages. 26 x 17 cm. Limited edition, copy 22 of 425 signed by James Joyce in green ink. Joyce wished to puzzle critics with his novel's plot which is not nearly as complex as the linguistic tactics he employed, and he did both. Finnegans Wake met with mixed review: some said it was unreadable, others praised Joyce for ingenuity. Joyce combined use of a number of languages with complex ironic implications to create wordplay and hidden meaning throughout this work. His polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words was intended to convey the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. The density and layers of meaning have induced scholars to dedicate a good portion of their lives studying it. The critic and scholar Richard Ellman was best known for his literary biography of Joyce noted, "In his earlier books Joyce forced modern literature to accept new styles, new subject matter, new kinds of plot and characterization. In his last book (Finnegans Wake) he forced it to accept a new area of being and a new language." Connolly: The Modern Movement 87. Slocum & Cahoon A49. Slight spine fading, some minor soiling to slipcase. Orig. publisher's orange/red buckram, backstrip lettered in gilt. Fine in the original yellow cloth slipcase as issued. Teg
Seller: Royoung Bookseller, Inc. ABAA, Ardsley, NY, U.S.A.
JOYCE, James. FINNEGANS WAKE. Faber & Faber/Viking Press, London/New York, 1939.
Price: US$15625.00 + shipping
Description: Original red buckram with gilt lettering on the spine. Copy #222 of 425 numbered copies printed on handmade paper and SIGNED by the author on the limitation page. One of the most important books of modern English fiction, if not one of the more readable. "Joyce insisted that each word, each sentence had several meanings and that the 'ideal lecteur' should devote his lifetime to it, like the Koran" (Connolly, THE MODERN MOVEMENT, 81); "The greatest failure in literature" (Burgess, 99 NOVELS: THE BEST IN ENGLISH SINCE 1939, page 25). Touch of wear to the heel of the spine which is mildly sunned. Lacking the original slipcase but with a custom-made slipcase in its place. Near Fine in a Fine custom slipcase
Seller: Charles Agvent, est. 1987, ABAA, ILAB, Fleetwood, PA, U.S.A.
JOYCE, James.. Finnegans Wake.. London: Faber & Faber; Viking Press, New York, 1939, 1939.
Price: US$16154.31 + shipping
Description: First edition, signed limited issue, number 366 of 425 copies signed by the author, printed on handmade paper, and specially bound; complete with the publisher's slipcase. The limitation was split between the British and American markets and sold simultaneously with the trade issues on 4 May 1939. "The most conspicuous innovation of Finnegans Wake is its use of 'dream-language'. After Ulysses Joyce believed that he had 'come to the end of English', and his last novel is a pervasive layering of multilingual puns in successive drafts which produces a fabric rich in semantic possibilities" (ODNB). Burgess, 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, p. 25; Connolly, The Modern Movement 87; Slocum & Cahoon A49. Large octavo. Original red buckram, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, top edge gilt, other edges uncut, leaves unopened. Housed in publisher's yellow cloth slipcase. Later compliments slip from Patricia MacManus (1914-2005) of the Viking Press, marking the publication of Steinbeck's East of Eden on 19 September 1952, loosely inserted. Spine very gently sunned and bumped at foot, minor rubbing, internally clean; lightly soiled slipcase with wear to edges and two short splits: a near-fine copy.
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom
Price: US$19500.00 + shipping
Description: First Edition. James Joyce. FINNEGANS WAKE. Signed Limited Edition. London; Faber & Faber; New York, 1939. 4to., 260 x 171 mm [10 1/4 x 6 3/4"]. 4 p.l., [first blank], 628 pp. Original gilt titled brick red buckram, edges untrimmed. In the original [mildly soiled] yellow cloth slipcase which is in solid very good or better condition. Curiously with a possible original clear plastic dustwrapper not mentioned in the bibliography but for all intents and purposes, this wrapper has always been on the book. An extremely attractive example, spotless text block, neatly signed by Joyce on the limitation's page, number 216 of 425 copies only. - Slocum and Cahoon A49. Having exhausted all the possibilities of English in "Ulysses," he had only one recourse for his next project, which was to create an entirely new language as a pastiche of all the existing ones; the result is "Finnegans Wake." The language in "Finnegans Wake" is a continuum of puns, portmanteaus, disfigured words, anagrams, and rare scraps of straightforward prose. What Joyce does is exploit the way words look and sound in order to associate them with remote, unrelated ideas. For example, his phrase "Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies" may sound familiar to those who happen to know that the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet are aleph, bet, gimel, daled. "Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphul of rhyme" recalls a nursery rhyme that may reside quietly in your most dormant memory cells, while "Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager's virtue" sounds like a drunk auditioning for the role of Hamlet. Imaginary adjectives that pertain to letters of the English alphabet are employed to describe Dublin as a city "with a deltic origin and a nuinous end." "Finnegans Wake" is the ultimate in esoterica, and what you get out of it depends largely on your store of knowledge, so that upon completion, with a mutual wink at Joyce, you congratulate yourself for being so clever. In 1994, in The Western Canon, Harold Bloom wrote of Finnegans Wake: "[if] aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [it] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante,"
Seller: TBCL The Book Collector's Library, Montreal, QC, Canada
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Faber & Faber; Viking Press, London New York, 1939.
Price: US$25000.00 + shipping
Condition: As New
Description: Limited Edition of of 425 copies printed. This copy is authentically SIGNED by James Joyce in green ink on the limitation leaf. A magnificent copy. The book is in excellent condition and appears UNREAD. The book is bound in the ORIGINAL publisher's cloth. The binding is tight with NO cocking or leaning and the boards are crisp. There is NO writing, marks or bookplates in the book. Overall, a stunning copy with the publisher's slipcase SIGNED by the author. We buy SIGNED Joyce First Editions.
Seller: Magnum Opus Rare Books, Missoula, MT, U.S.A.