A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Huebsch, 1917. Second Printing. Publisher’s blue cloth boards, title lettered in blind to upper cover. Cloth heavily faded and scuffed, occasional light spotting to page margins, otherwise a good copy. 299.

This second printing appeared in April 1917, just months after the book’s landmark first publication in December 1916. The 1917 Huebsch printing was technically a reprint from the same plates as the first edition, with minimal differences.

The first edition was a modest run of 1,250 sets of sheets, with 500 sets sold to the Egoist Press in London; the true American first edition consisted of roughly 750 copies. This second printing was likely also quite small, perhaps around 500 copies. It did not incorporate the author’s corrections. In April 1917, Joyce sent his publisher a list of nearly 400 corrections to the first edition, but they arrived too late. Huebsch replied that he had “just printed a second edition from the first plates” and could not implement the changes unless there was a large demand for a new run. The corrected text would not appear until later editions, specifically the second English edition printed in Southport in 1917 (published by the Egoist Press in 1918) and the Jonathan Cape edition of 1924, which used Joyce’s and Harriet Weaver’s correction lists.