Ulysses by Joyce, James - 1922

Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922. First Edition. Paperback. good. 1st edition, 1st issue of 750 (#589) copies (the first ones on Feb. 2nd), before the 100 on Dutch paper (Feb. 13th) and the 150 on large paper (Mar. 4th). Original printed paper wrappers, rebacked with matching paper, upper right corner of front wrapper, one edge flap, and 5 blank page corners repaired, rear endpaper restored, little chips along the edges, else good condition, complete, and we're being precise, and other depictions are suspiciously vague. 1st editions of Ulysses for what we're asking are gone. The cheapest equivalents start at twice our price and go up from there, and the only thing 4 generations of "1st thus" reprints share in common is declining demand, but a new generation of readers is on the rise. They've heard it's the supreme modernist novel and industrial strength psychological realism, and they're told it was condemned as scandalous erotica, in the days when safe sex meant a padded headboard, and they've read it was stoutly suppressed by authorities fearful of any novel portraying chastity as an unlit lamp, or adult abstinence as malnutrition. But millennials don't care what squares thought about sex 95 years ago, or that from the 1940s to the 1970s Ulysses' meaning was mused upon as a cypher in some language twins teach each other. They just face it as a long and arduous 732 page, 265,000 word legacy, a test of focus, set in turn of the century Dublin, and only worth the effort because it recaptures life in a signally fascinating time and place. So the motivation for reading Ulysses has been protean in each generation, but it always stayed the best of its type, and that flexibility of appeal is the profile of conscious art. Custom quarter morocco box. Let's try to narrow the gap between you and James Joyce. Here he is on the moon: "Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible." -Ulysses Ready to read it? Here's a boost. Don't hesitate. Proceed aggressively. If your comprehension lapses-even for pages at a time-it's better to push on seeing as you're going to get lost in the random flux, where things encountered early are not explained until much later, so you'll have to reread it anyway.