FINNEGANS WAKE

London: Faber and Faber, 1939. First Edition. 8vo, publisher’s original red cloth, decorated on the spine with gilt lettering and ruling, with excellent and skillful facsimile of the original dustjacket. 628 pp. A handsome copy of the book with interesting notes to the verso of one leaf, very little evidence of age or use, the last leaf a bit loose at the hinge. RARE AND IMPORTANT FIRST EDITION OF THIS CLASSIC WORK OF TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE. “You were bred, fed, fostered and fattened from holy childhood up in this two easter island...and now, forsooth, a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, agoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul.” Finnegans Wake
No book has ever been more ambitiously conceived than Joyce’s FINNEGAN'S WAKE. If ULYSSES represents the pinnacle of the Modernist movement, FINNEGAN'S WAKE is a step beyond; it stands in the same relation to ULYSSES as ULYSSES does to A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST....—an extension which is also a completely new conception. Joyce envisioned the book as nothing less than a "history of the world." Seventeen years in the writing, and composed in a sort of meta-language--"an Esperanto for the art of fiction"--it stands as a unique monument to language and literature and the modern age. Slocum and Calhoun A49; Bradbury, The Modern World, 157-176. About this work, he stated “‘I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. Every novelist knows the recipe...But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way. Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book... I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single aesthetic purpose.’” (Ellmann)
This copy offers the the look of the original book, but at a much better price since the original dustjacket is not present.