BECKETT (Samuel). & JOYCE (James).

Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.

His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.

By Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliott Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, William Carlos Williams with Letters of Protest by G.V.L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon. Small 4to., original printed wrappers with elaborate typographic roundel. First edition, one of 96 copies (No. 73) on Verge d’Arches. 8vo., original cream printed wrappers. Uncut and unopened. Paris, Shakespeare & Co, 1929.

£5,000.00

This collection of critical essays on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (being published in instalments) was a sort of circling of the wagons by the Anglophone intellectuals of Paris. Beckett was much in Joyce’s company at the time, and this essay (the first of the essays here published, by virtue of the alphabet) is his first publication. It takes few intellectual prisoners: “ … if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it … His writing is not about something; it is that something itself“.

A very good copy with some slight overall soiling to the wrappers and two short areas of wear at the foot of each hinge, preserved in a handsome modern slipcase.

Stock No.
231904