The Venture. An Annual of Art and Literature 1905. London: John Baillie, [1905]. First Edition. Pp 184, [6]; uncut. Publisher’s cream pictorial cloth boards. Covers dust soiled & mottled, wear to head & tail of spine; contents pages in nice bright condition.

Illustrated with a coloured frontispiece & twenty-three plates (some in colour) with lettered guards. The second of only two issues of this annual to be printed.

The 1905 volume is particularly significant in containing the first appearance in book form of ‘What Counsel has the Hooded Moon’ and ‘Thou leanest to the Shell of Night‘ by James Joyce later published in his first book ‘Chamber Music’ in 1907.

Interestingly it also prints two poems by Joyce’s friend, Oliver St John Gogarty, who served as the inspiration for Buck Milligan in Ulysses.