JOYCE JAMES: (1882-1941) Irish novelist and poet. Book signed, being a hardback edition of Anna Livia Plurabelle, with a preface by Padraic Colum, First edition, limited signed issue, published by Crosby Gaige, New York, 1928. One of 800 copies distributed in America by Random House, this copy numbered 121 and signed (´James Joyce´) by Joyce to the limitation leaf. The 8vo edition (Slocum & Cahoon A32) is bound in the publisher´s original brown cloth with gilt and blindstamped decorations to the covers and spine, and with top edge gilt. Some very light, extremely minor age wear, VG

A highly important early publication from Joyce's Work in Progress, the experimental work which would ultimately be published as Finnegans Wake (1939). Anna Livia Plurabelle represents the first publication in book form of this celebrated section, which became Chapter VIII of Finnegans Wake. The episode centres upon Anna Livia Plurabelle, Joyce's personification of the River Liffey, and exemplifies the linguistic experimentation, wordplay and fusion of myth, history and Dublin life that would characterise his final masterpiece.