Ulysses.

JOYCE, James.

Item Number: 4263

London: For the Egoist Press by John Rodker, 1922.

The first English edition, printed in France. Bound in full blue morocco, raised bands, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, double gilt ruled to the front and rear panels, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. One of 2000 copies. Ownership copy of playwright and poet, socialist and politician Sam DeWitt, best known for having been barred from taking his seat in the New Your State Assembly in 1920, along with four others, after having been elected as a Socialist from his Bronx district. A colorful figure in New York leftist politics and the Bohemian scene in Greenwich Village, DeWitt owned and operated a company trading in used machinery in lower Manhattan, and published a number of books or poetry and several plays. He was a long-time friend of left wing writer Upton Sinclair. In Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle, published in 1906, one of the main characters, Nicolas Schliemann, is said to be based on Sam DeWitt. This copy bears his ownership signature where – in apparent reference to the “pornographic” nature of the book – De Witt has written “This is my book” below which he has sketched the male genitalia with “Ex” on one side, and “Libris” on the other, and then, below the sketch, his signature and his address in Bronx, NY. According to Slocum & Cahoon, of the 2000 copies of Ulysses from the first edition plates, approximately 500 were sent to America and subsequently burned by government censorship authorities.

Ulysses was published in Paris by Shakespeare & Company, 1922. It was a struggle for the author to find a publisher, a comic irony considering that Ulysses is "[u]niversally hailed as the most influential work of modern times" (Grolier Joyce 69). Ulysses was an immediate success. The first printing sold out, and "within a year Joyce had become a well-known literary figure. Ulysses was explosive in its impact on the literary world of 1922" (de Grazia, 27).