A beautiful first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses is expected to make up to $150,000 at auction later this month.
The book is the Annette Campbell-White copy of Joyce’s great 1922 work, and is #75 in a 100-print first edition printed on Dutch handmade paper. It is signed by Joyce and was bound by Bayntun-Riviere.
This copy had been omitted from the first census of this first edition.
It was given to Alfred Kohnstamm, a patron of the arts, by Blake Ozias in December 1922, the year of publication.
This is confirmed by an almost-invisible inscription just now discovered.
The message also confirms the book’s mixed reputation. Ozias, a businessman and writer, writes: “To my best friend Alfred Kohnstamm. I cannot say anything about this book because I haven’t had time to read it. Competent critics have called it the greatest contribution to the fiction of the 20th Century and equally competent critics have called it tosh. I leave it to you.”
A beautiful binding adds to the attraction of this first-edition of Ulysses. Image courtesy of Christie’s.
Joyce’s first works had been popular, and written in a relatively conventional way.
Not so Ulysses. And that made publishing it difficult. It was originally destined for a subscriber-only serial publication. But its obscenity – by 1922 standards – made that impossible.
The result was this printing of 1,000 copies by Sylvia Beach of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris.
The Annette Campbell-White copy is one of the first 100, numbered and signed.
Joyce did not sign numbers 101 to 250, which were also printed on slightly less high-quality, vergé d’Arches, paper.
Then 750 copies on lower-grade, vergé à barbes paper and without signature completed the 1,000.
All of these copies are extremely valuable. For example, a “fine” copy of the final 750 is listed for sale now at £25,000.
The most valuable copies of Ulysses are from this edition.
One copy sold for $460,500 in 2002, a record for a first-edition, 20th-century book.
A signed dedication from Joyce to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaved helped push another copy to £275,000 in London in 2009.
This book has previously been sold in 1992 and 2002, when Annette Campbell-White bought it before selling it in 2007.
Campbell-White is a venture capitalist and a well-known book collector.
Her book collection was first given structure by Ulysses, when she bought a copy for $7,500 in 1984 and used it as a jumping-off point to collect all of Cyril Connolly’s 100 “key books” of the Modern Movement.
She described the sale of this collection in 2007 as liberating.
Now her copy will find a new home as Christie’s auction it online in a sale closing on January 28.
It carries an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000.
