60 Great Books Bauman Rare Books - 34 - Exceptional And Scarce First Edition Of Joyce’s Dubliners 32. JOYCE, James. Dubliners. London, 1914. Octavo, original dark red cloth, custom slipcase and half morocco clamshell box. $28,000. Rare first edition of Joyce’s first prose work, his great collection of short stories, one of only 1250 copies printed (499 of which were sunk en route to America). This collection includes some of the finest stories written in the English language, including “Araby,” “Counterparts,” and the classic “The Dead.” One of no more than 764 copies printed (and perhaps as few as 246). Few texts have traveled such a rocky road publication. Dubliners was first accepted by the publisher Grant Richards in February 1906, but the printer objected to certain passages and refused to do the job due to criminal liability under English obscenity laws. It ran through three other publishers unsuccessfully, one of whom burned a 1000-copy edition. Finally, Grant Richards re-accepted the book, with a contract stipulating no royalties on the first 500 copies and a guarantee by Joyce to buy 120 copies himself. Only 1250 sets of sheets were printed for the first edition and 504 of those sets were sold to the New York publisher B.W. Huebsch in 1916 for the first American edition. “It has also been reported that in 1915 Grant Richards sold without Joyce’s knowledge 500 sets of [the original 1250] Dubliners sheets to Albert and Charles Boni of New York… A new title page was prepared for the New York imprint, and 499 copies were shipped to New York on the S.S. Arabic which was torpedoed in August 1915. All copies were lost except one which Albert Boni kept in his personal possession” (Slocum & Cahoon A8). Thus, of the original 1250 sets of sheets, 504 are known to have been sold for the American edition and 499 are thought to be at the bottom of the sea. Joyce was living in Trieste when he signed his contract with Richards, and the 120 copies he agreed to purchase were to be sold there. Without exceedingly rare dust jacket. Only a few scattered spots of foxing, cloth exceptional with only slightest soiling and toning to spine, cover gilt bright. “These are stories of frustrations great and small, of illusions lost, of deep loneliness, of fractured marriages, of lives of ‘commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness’… These are stories of desperate lives lived on the margins; the lives Joyce knew.” —Katherine Mullin
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