Ulysses (1927) owned by the acclaimed novelist Anthony Powell

Item Details

Paris, Shakespeare & Co., 1927

JOYCE, James (1882-1941)

Ulysses (1927)

Format: Octavo. 9th overall printing and the 2nd printing of the 2nd edition. 197 x 248 mm.

Published in blue paper covers. Back cover missing and edges rubbed, nicked and worn. Spine with loss and repaired with archival adhesive. Housed in a custom-made clamshell box of English Kid leather with 23-karat hand gold tooling complements, and 23-karate gold stamped title and author inspired by the original type.

This is Anthony Powell’s copy with his bookplate on the verso of the first endpaper. Powell was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975.

Notably, Powell discussed his copy of Ulysses in an interview with The Guardian on July 4th, 2014. “Nearly every literary memoirist born in the first decade of the 20th century has his James Joyce moment. Anthony Powell remembered smuggling back a copy of the original 1920's Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses from Paris, his view of the book forever after colored by the circumstances in which it had been obtained ('Somehow one needs the grey paper, the French compositors, the under-the-counter transaction')."

Provenance: Powell, Anthony.