Dubliners. London: Grant Richards, 1914. First Edition. Rebound in contemporary maroon cloth & endpapers with title ‘Dubliners’ gilt stamped on spine. Covers lightly scuffed with a few pale stain marks to upper cover. Contents pages in nice clean condition throughout.

THE FIRST EDITION OF JOYCE’S EARLIEST MASTERPIECE AND ARGUABLY THE GREATEST COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES IN ENGLISH. Approximately 746 copies published.

Grant Richards accepted the collection then numbering only twelve stories as early as February 1906, but publication was abandoned because of the printer’s objections to some of the language used in the story, ‘Two Gallants’. Richards eventually agreed to publish the collection in March 1914, but on the harshest terms: Joyce received neither advance nor royalties on the first 500 copies, and he was contractually obliged to purchase 120 copies.

His persistence has been vindicated: the stories, ‘written for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness’ (Joyce to Richards, 5 May 1906), stand beside those of Chekhov and De Maupassant, and the final story, ‘The Dead’, is regularly cited as the greatest work of short fiction in English.

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