Finnegans Wake. Embodying All the Author’s Corrections. New York: Viking Press, 1959. Eight Printing. American Edition, Paperback Issue. Pp, 628. Coloured printed card wrappers. A good copy. Housed in collector’s solander box.

Inscribed by Sylvia Beach to Eileen MacCarvill on the front end paper and with MacCarvill’s annotations in the text.

‘For Eileen MacCarvill the No 1 authority on Finnegans Wake in the opinion of her admirer Sylvia Beach, Dublin, July 8 1960’

Sylvia Beach, the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, visited Dublin on two significant occasions. In June 1960 she made her first trip to Dublin and visited the Joyce Tower at Sandycove. She returned on the 58th anniversary of Bloomsday (16 June, 1962) to mark the official opening of the Martello Tower in Sandycove as a Joyce Museum.

Dr Eileen McCarville was an English lecture in UCD. A prominent Republican during the War of Independence she acted as Micheal Collins Director of Publicity for which she was charged with High Treason by the British authorities. After the war MacCarvill entered life in academia, becoming a supporter of artists including Evie Hone and Jack B. Yeats. An authority and scholar on Joyce, apparently being one of the first people in Ireland to read Ulysses while imprisoned in Kilmainham.

 An interesting and poignant association item.