Giacomo Joyce, by James Joyce

NY: Vincent FitzGerald & Co, 1989. Brown, Hannah. Folio. (32)pp. One of fifty copies, signed by the artist, Susan Weil. Throughout the text are scattered collages, cut papers, and etchings that work together to create an interactive, multimedia experience for the reader, who thus physically engages with the work in a manner reflective of reading Joyce's stream-of-consciousness literature. The book most obviously and completely points toward this characteristic freedom in a prepublication sampling of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is among the many passages included in the original Giacomo Joyce manuscript and appears in later novels. That original manuscript, which was comprised of fifty fragments transcribed onto large sheets of sketching paper, coheres into a love poem tracking the course of Joyce's infatuation with one of his students whom he taught while in Trieste between 1911 and 1914.

This copy specially bound by Hannah Brown in a full leather case binding, with boards of grey goatskin decorated with linear embroidery in a variety of colors, taking as the basis for its design one of the illustrations within the text, where a sheet of silvery webbed paper with cut-outs overlays a pink sheet behind. Brown captures that motif mainly through her skillful embroidery, but also with occasional silver inlays and cut-outs to the boards, through the latter of which can be seen endpapers and matching doublures created by roller-ing acrylic paints in a range of colors onto Zerkall paper to match the colors found throughout the text block. Onto those endpapers and doublures Brown has embroidered in variegated thread excerpts from the text. Her care for color is likewise reflected in the stubs and bands, as well as in the spine of sanded pink goatskin. Very fine. Housed in cloth-covered clamshell box lined with felt.