London: Faber and Faber, 1939. First edition. First edition, first impression, trade issue, of Joyce’s final work. Octavo. Original red cloth, lettering to spine in gilt, top edge yellow, others untrimmed. With dust jacket. Binding sharp, the cloth bright, a touch of foxing to endpapers, light browning to first blank and last leaf, else internally clean; a near-fine copy in like dust jacket, couple of chips at head of the slightly sunned spine panel, a few nicks to edges, else bright and fresh, not price clipped; a remarkably attractive copy. The print run for the standard trade edition was 3,400, of which 950 copies in sheets were destroyed.

Noted for its avant-garde defiance of traditional narrative, Finnegan's Wake flummoxed reviewers who admired Joyce's writing but recognized the difficulty of judging his work in its own time. "In 20 years' time, with sufficient study and the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it," a contemporary critic for the Guardian wrote in 1939. "In this volume, the theme is language and the language the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited" (contemporary Guardian review). Composed across seventeen years, Finnegan's Wake remains one of the most difficult and important works in Joyce's literary ouevre, and it is considered a high point of Modernism.

Slocum & Cahoon A47; Connolly, The Modern Movement, 87. Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. (Item #4913)