Ulysses. by JOYCE, James - 1936

London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1936. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery First UK edition, first impression, limited issue, number 324 of 900 copies on japon vellum and bound in buckram, from a total edition of 1,000 copies. The Bodley Head Ulysses established the text for the succeeding 25 years.
The famous legal judgement by John M. Woolsey lifting the ban in America on the publishing of the book is printed as an appendix, together with the International Letter of Protest (1927) against Samuel Roth's piracy of Ulysses, to which over 167 literary and intellectual figures put their names, including Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot.
Ulysses, first published in Paris in 1922, is widely recognized as the key book of 20th-century English literature and is among the major works in the modernist canon. "Joyce, not to mince words, is Ireland's Shakespeare, its Goethe, its Racine, its Tolstoy" (John Sutherland). The book also proved to be a major test case for laws of freedom of expression. "Forced underground by censors … this was a cryptoclassic already before it was read, a subversive colossus" (Sherry, p. 1). Crown octavo. Original green buckram, Homeric bow device designed by Eric Gill on front cover in gilt, top edge gilt, others untrimmed, many uncut. With dust jacket. Loosely inserted is the publisher's single sheet advertisement. Spine ends sunned, bump to lower edge of front cover, gilt to front cover remaining notably bright, light foxing to edges and endpapers. A near-fine copy in lightly soiled jacket, minor nicks from creasing to edges, short closed tear at foot of rear panel, chips to spine and flap fold ends, a little loss to foot of toned and lightly splash-marked spine, front panel bright and clean. Slocum & Cahoon A23. Norman Sherry, Joyce: Ulysses, 2004; Norman Sherry, "Ireland's Shakespeare", The Guardian, 10 Feb 2004, available online.