Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1939. First Edition, Limited Issue. Pp, 627, uncut. Bound in red buckram, spine gilt stamped on two panels, housed in publisher’s yellow cloth slipcase. a nice bright copy, the slipcase dust soiled and lightly worn.

Limited Edition, of 425 Copies, Signed by James Joyce (this copy number 259)

Published two years before the author’s death, this is Joyce’s final novel, appropriately all-embracing, bewildering in content, and with a language that is often mellifluous and at the same time inaccessible by any standard measure of denotation. Joyce has said that a person could profitably devote a lifetime to “Finnegans Wake.”

Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellman observed, “In his earlier books Joyce forced modern literature to accept new styles, new subject matter, new kinds of plot and characterisation. In his last book he forced it to accept a new area of being and a new language.