First edition. Original maroon cloth with gilt titles in the very rare green dustwrapper with titles in black. A fine copy, bright and crisp, in a very good dustwrapper indeed, which has some subtle strengthening to folds and corners and some trivial fraying to the base of the spine, but is very clean and crisp. An exceptional survival of one of the rarest books of importance from the twentieth century.

The Bradley Martin copy of Joyce's unsurpassed collection of short stories, complete with its impossibly rare dustwrapper. In the last forty years, only three other copies have been sold at auction.
The book, in which Joyce attempts to 'present Dublin to the world' had a tortuous birth: it was to be Joyce's first published work and appear in 1906, but the publication was abandoned during printing due to disagreements between Joyce and his publishers regarding emendations. In defence of his writing, Joyce said famously in a letter to Richards "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass."
After the publication of Chamber Music in 1907 Joyce offered Dubliners to Elkin Mathews and upon rejection approached the Dublin publishers Maunsel. They printed an edition of 1000 copies in July 1910, but all but a few of the page proofs were burned by the printer because of "objectionable" passages in some of the stories. In 1913 Richards eventually agreed to publish the book in an edition of 1250 copies, 746 of which were bound up and the remaining 504 were sold to B.W. Huebsch to form the American edition. The book was published on 15th June, 1914.

Stock ID: 32260