Joyce, James

The Egoist: An Individualist Review. London: The New Freewoman, 1914-1916.

Folio: (320 x 210 mm). Original self-wrappered periodical comprising 48 issues (Vol. 1 Number 1 to Vol. III Number 12) in original publisher's binding of 3 gilt-ruled and titled blue half-morocco and linen cloth volumes; a little rubbing and wear to edges of bindings, but issues very clean and unspotted.

Rare first publication of  A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man.   Harriet Shaw, Dora Marsden and Richard Aldington produced this leading Modernist periodical, putting in front of readers not only Joyce's first novel (published serially when Pound was editing, beginning on February 1914, and then through the September, 1915 issue) but also Wyndam Lewis' Tarr, T.S. Eliot's criticism and even over-looked Symbolists such as the ecstatic reveries of the Comte de Lautremont. Given the format and extreme fragility of the magazine, individual issues rarely turn up in good condition and a significant sequential run, as here, is very uncommon indeed, and even more so in a publisher's binding.  This particlar series, marking Joyce's major Modernist debut, has not appeared at auction in three decades and was even absent from the comprehensive Joyce catalog issued by Glenn Horowitz in 1996, though that collection did contain appropriately a copy of the first English edition of the book, published by The Egoist, inscribed to Weaver.