Beschreibung:

JOYCE (JAMES)Ulysses, 'PRESS COPY' SENT TO THE EDITOR OF THE LONDON MERCURY, printed on a variety of papers (mostly thick machine-made book paper, some thinner newsprint-type, and 4 leaves on semi-glossy white paper), lacking pp.81-192, 353-384, 657 and 658, 671 and 672, and 691 to 730, initial and final blanks [*]1-2 and [47]1-2 (intended for insertion under folding flaps of covers) not issued, a handful of pencil and ink marginal lines in first 70 pages, toning, a few inky finger-marks, some short splits at folds, losses to blank margins of final 2 leaves, unbound as issued, preserved in solander box [cf. Slocum and Cahoon A17], 4to (235 x 185mm.), Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1922FootnotesPRESS COPY OF ULYSSES, sent to Jack Squire at the London Mercury and twice saved from the flames.
One of only about thirteen press copies produced to be sent out at Joyce's request, aside from the run of 1,000 copies on various hand-made papers that comprise the first edition. This copy was directed to Jack Squire, editor of the London Mercury. Squire's assistant editor later in the Twenties was a young Alan Pryce-Jones who would recall that Squire "had admired Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and wrote asking for proofs of any subsequent book" (The Bonus of Laughter, 1987, p.56). However, Squire was a firm traditionalist and did not get on with the Modernists, Bloomsbury, or the Sitwells; Woolf called him "more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the bargain", whilst for Eliot he was a critic "whose solemn trifling fascinates multitudes".
Pryce-Jones continues: "One day, therefore, I found the unbound pages of Ulysses, minus a fair-sized lacuna, in a cupboard behind my desk. I asked how they had got there, and was ordered, 'Burn them at once.' His secretary, Grace Chapman, had tried to carry out the same order but had only a tiny iron range, dating from 1870 or so, and also in the room, to burn them in, so that she had soon been discouraged. I have them still." Someone, presumably at the Mercury, marked up several early passages in this copy, but a disgusted Squire refused to review it, leading to the resignation of his then assistant editor Edward Shanks. It may be no coincidence that missing from this copy are all but the last page of the sexually-explicit final episode, Penelope.
Sylvia Beach had originally neglected to ask the printer Darantière to produce extra copies for press and libraries. When the need became apparent in the summer of 1921, her request for press copies came too late in the printing process. Darantière was forced to fill the gap by giving her some cheaply-produced copies on plain wood pulp stock which had been intended as the ten legal deposit copies required by French law. He also cobbled together a few more copies using a mixture of paper stocks, and reported to Beach on 16 March 1922 that he could supply about thirteen. The present example is one of these copies made up by Darantière. The press copies were issued unbound, and do not include the outer blank leaves that retained the dust-jacket of the standard copies.
On 17 November 1922, Joyce discussed the press copies in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver. The copies, he wrote, had been sent to "Pound, Eliot, Colum, Buss, Hemingway, Linati, Benco, Jaloux, Slocombe, Squire [the present copy], Mais, Aldington, Hueffer, Charles du Bos, Ciolkowska". Other copies are known to have been sent to A.R. Orage and George Saintsbury. Joyce reports having himself applied, "with great delight", ink stamps to these copies, which read 'Unnumbered Press Copy' below the limitation statement and 'Press Copy' on the half-title and title.
The 'Press Copy' stamps vary in format: a smaller italic version in black ink (found here on the half-title, and in the same place in the Kate Buss copy), and a larger roman version usually in purple ink (here used on the title, as in the BnF copy; the Hemingway copy repeats the roman stamp instead of the italic on the half-title). There appears to be only one 'Unnumbered Press Copy' stamp used consistently below the limitation statement in every press copy, with a slightly misaligned 'un-'. We are aware of a press copy in a London private collection stamped in red ink rather than purple.
Recorded press copies include:
1) Presentation copy to Kate Buss—Christie's, 2 December 2003, lot 12
2) Presentation copy to Ezra Pound—private collection, Dublin
3) Presentation copy to Muriel Ciolkowska—Houghton Library
4) Presentation copy to Sisley Huddleston—Harry Ransom Center
5) Jonathan Goodwin copy—Sotheby's New York, 12 April 1978, lot 736
6) Michael Healy—James Laughlin
7) Richard Aldington—John J. Slocum—Beinecke Library
8) Carlo Linati—Beinecke Library
9) Josephine Murray—University of Tulsa
10) Ernest Hemingway—John F. Kennedy Library
11) Private collection, London (possibly the same copy as number 6 above)
12) Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Provenance: John Collings "Jack" Squire (1884-1958), editor of the London Mercury; Alan Pryce-Jones (1908-2000); thence by descent.