Reliquiae.

FINALY, Marguerite. [James Joyce].

$17,500.00

Item Number: 131904

Paris: Privately Printed, 1925.

James Joyce’s first edition copy of the collected works of Marguerite Finaly, compiled by her husband, Horace Finaly, in her memory and privately printed for distribution to friends; with Joyce’s ownership inscription. Octavo, bound in full crushed morocco by G. Cretté with gilt titles to the spine, silk-watered doublures and endleaves, tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of Marguerite Finaly. One of 150 copies privately printed. Signed and dated by Joyce on the title page, “James Joyce Paris 27.xi.1926.” Horace Finaly became a close friend of Marcel Proust in Paris and contributed to the magazine La Banquette. He rose to prominence as head of La Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas from 1919 to 1937, and enabled several major French-American industrial collaborations. He is referred to in Finnegans Wake, which Joyce was writing at the time of his inscription: “Play actors by us ever have crash to their gate. Mr.Messop and Mr Borry will produce of themselves, as they’re twof genitalmen of Veruno, Sernior Nowno and Senior Brolano (finaly! finaly!), all for love of a fair penitent that, a she be broughton, rhoda’s a rosy she. Their two big skins! How they strave to gat her! Such a boyplay!” In very good condition. Housed in a custom marbled slipcase. Rare and desirable from Joyce’s personal collection.

One of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century, Irish novelist James Joyce is best known for his masterworks Ulysses (1922), Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man (1916), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses. By 1924 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals transatlantic review and transition, under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939. The work has assumed a preeminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess praised the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Harold Bloom called the book "Joyce's masterpiece", and wrote that "[if] aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante." Listed by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century.