Joyce (James) Chamber Music, first edition, first impression, pictorial title, bookplate of Maxwell Steinhardt to pastedown, very faintly offset, small paper repair to front free endpaper (nicked), original cloth, gilt, third variant binding with thin wove endpapers and the poems in signature C poorly centred on the page, very light rubbing to spine ends, otherwise a very excellent copy, [Slocum & Cahoon A3], 12mo, 1907.

⁂ Joyce's first published volume of poetry, scarce in the first issue, preceded only by the separately published poems Et tu Healy (of which no printed copies are known) and the rare broadside The Holy Office.

The priority of the second and third variants is undetermined but now thought that very few copies of the first edition were actually gathered and bound in 1907, perhaps only 50-100. When Joyce was at the height of his fame later in the 1920s, Elkin Mathews seem to have "rediscovered" the remainder of his poems and bound them up in a slightly darker green cloth. Maxwell Steinhardt was a retired lawyer and an avid book collector. An admirer of George Bernard Shaw, he was president of the Shaw Society of America.