Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1939. First Edition. Pp, 628, uncut. Large 8vo. Publisher’s gilt-stamped red cloth, red and yellow dust jacket. Light fraying to upper edge of jacket, with a little loss to tail of spine, otherwise a fine bright copy, without the usual off-setting normally present to endpapers.

Joyce began work on the book immediately after completing Ulysses, writing the first pages on 11th March 1923. In this infinitely complex work, Joyce mixed the mythological and the mundane, the universal and the parochial, as never before.

The full text of Finnegans Wake was issued simultaneously in London and New York on 4th May 1939. The American edition published by Viking Press being offset from reproduction proofs supplied by Faber.

Finnegan Wake is a work of such staggering complexity that even seasoned critics like Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly were initially wary of it, although Wilson neatly summarised it as an ‘attempt to render the dream fantasies and the half-conscious sensations experienced by a single person in the course of a night’s sleep’ (The Wound and the Bow p.243). ‘Joyce insisted that each word, each sentence had several meanings and that the ‘id’al lecteur’ should devote his life-time to it, like the Koran.’ (Connolly: The Modern Movement 87).

[Slocum & Cahoon A47]