The Cat and the Devil.

JOYCE, James.

Item Number: 109838

London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

First British edition of Joyce’s only story for children, with paintings by award-winning artist Gerald Rose. Octavo, original pictorial boards. Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. A very bright example.

In a 1936 letter to his grandson Stephen, Joyce included this fable “about the overnight construction of a bridge that the Devil builds in exchange for the soul of its first traveler” (Fargnoli & Gillespie, 30). Although the text was first published in Joyce’s collected letters (1957), it did not appear as a separate book until 1964, when Dodd, Mead and Company in New York released it with illustrations by Richard Erdoes. Gerald Rose, who illustrated this edition, won the prestigious Kate Greenway Medal in 1960 for “distinguished work in the illustration of children’s books” (Eyre, 180-81).