Chamber Music. London: Elkin Mathews, 1907. First Edition, First Issue. Thin 12mo. Publisher’s green cloth, gilt lettered on front cover & spine. Title printed within pictorial border. Gift inscription dated 4th June, 1907, to front free endpaper. Light shelf wear to covers, contents in fine bright condition. Housed in collector’s clamshell box.

Publication took place on 10 May 1907 in a run of 509 copies, which were not all bound at once. This first issue is slightly larger in size, bound in a light green cloth with thick laid endpapers showing horizontal chain lines, and it has the poems in signature C well-centred. The second and third variants were bound up in dark green cloth a few years later. They are both trimmed slightly smaller, leaving the poems in signature C poorly centred.

W.B. Yeats introduced Joyce to Arthur Symons, who “was responsible for the publication of Chamber Music and for much of the praise it received” (Slocum and Cahoon, p.6). Joyce never received any royalties for the book. Unlike his later work, the poems in Chamber Music were written in a straightforward, romantic style that presents a striking and endearing contrast to the complexities of his later novels.