A first edition of Ulysses by James Joyce sold for a hammer price of 9,500 at Fonsie Mealy’s online rare books and collectibles sale in Castlecomer today. Published by Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in 1922 this was number 285 of 750 copies on handmade paper.
Joyce’s A Protest Against Plagiarism, an original printed copy of the protest and appeal issued in French by a constellation of American and European literary and cultural figures in 1927 over the unauthorised publication of sections of Ulysses by American publisher Samuel Roth in his Two Worlds Monthly magazine, without permission or royalty and in ‘un texte incomplete’ sold for 4,600. Signatories range from Albert Einstein to H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Paul Valery, Bertrand Russell, Marcel Prevost, Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty, E. Oe. Somerville, Italo Svevo, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Alice S. Green, Andre Gide, Augusta Gregory, Benedetto Croce, John Galsworthy, Robert Bridges, Arnold Bennett, Knut Hamsun, Wyndham Lewis, Gabriel Miro, Bunin, Luigi Pirandello, T.S.Eliot. The extraordinary range and quality of the signatories testifies to Joyce’s worldwide reputation and influence, five years after publishing Ulysses.
An Atlas Folio of monuments in Egypt and Nubia by Ippolito Rosellini published in Pisa in three volumes from 1832-34 with 134 plates sold for 25,000 at hammer. It had been estimated at 5,000-7,000. This was the top lot in a sale which realised just over 440,000 on the hammer.