Joyce, James

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Egoist Press, 1917

8vo. Publisher's green cloth; expertly rebacked retaining original spine, few minor touch-ups to gilt along bottom rule and hinges reinforced. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.

Connolly 26; Slocum and Cahoon A12

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First edition, English issue, made up of American sheets, probably only 750 copies issued. A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce’s first novel, was published December 29, 1916. It was serialized by Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce’s most beneficent patron, in The Egoist—then edited by Ezra Pound—in twenty-five installments between February 2 (Joyce’s birthday), 1914 and September 1, 1915. After her numerous attempts to find an English printer willing to prepare the text to so scandalous a volume were thwarted, Weaver sent a copy of the serialized text to Edmond Byrne Hackett in New York, who contacted B.W. Huebsch, an independent New York publisher who would ultimately be responsible for the first edition. Weaver cabled to Huebsch and ordered 750 sets of sheets from him for this English issue, which was ultimately published on February 12, 1917.

Presentation to a longtime supporter who later helped the author flee occupied Europe: "To Edmund Brauchbar / James Joyce / Zurich: Switzerland 12/iii/917." Brauchbar was one of several men to whom Rudolf Goldschmidt introduced Joyce in 1915 Zurich. “These men were well-to-do,” Ellmann writes, “and they agreed readily to take lessons in English from Joyce, in some instances not because they wanted to learn the language but because they wanted to help him discreetly…. His sympathetic pupils often paid for lessons they never took, and Claud W. Sykes later remarked that Joyce was sometimes humorously indignant if a pupil insisted upon having the lessons he had paid for” (Ellman p. 408). In November of that year, Joyce inscribed a copy of Dubliners to Goldschmidt “with gratitude,” and justly so: Goldschmidt had introduced him not just to students or even to patrons, but in several cases, as with Brauchbar, to friends whose affection and esteem would endure.

In 1940, Brauchbar posted half the surety Joyce needed to get his family out of occupied France during World War II:

“Joyce had already written a general statement of his plight to his old friend Edmund Bauchbar, an exporter now in the Untied States but in control of branch offices in Zurich and Lyons, and Brauchbar instructed his son Rudolph and his son’s business associate, Gustav Zumsteg, in Zurich, to give all possible support. “I thank you very much for having remembered me, whom so many seem to have forgotten,” Joyce wrote Brauchbar. (ibid p. 749)