Books

First edition, first issue, of the author's first book, prompting his resignation from his employment at a bank two months before publication. "These delicate, lyrical verses were the work of the young poet of the college years and later", contrasting with the fiction which proved "a reversal of the earlier mood and view of the world" (Costello, p. 273). Publication took place on 10 May 1907 in a run of 509 copies, which were not all bound at once. This first issue is slightly larger in size, bound in a light green cloth with thick laid endpapers showing horizontal chain lines, and it has the poems in signature C well-centred. The second and third variants were bound up in dark green cloth a few years later. They are both trimmed slightly smaller, leaving the poems in signature C poorly centred. It is from the library of Geoffrey Arundel Whitworth CBE (1883-1951), the founder of the British Drama League, who began working for the publisher Chatto & Windus in the same year Chamber Music was published. "Whitworth knew many writers, established and new; through him the firm attracted works by such authors as G. K. Chesterton, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell". In 1934, George Bernard Shaw described Whitworth as "one of the most important people in the theatre today" (ODNB). His ownership inscription is on the front free endpaper. Small octavo. Original light green cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt. Housed in a dark green cloth chemise and gilt-decorated green morocco slipcase by René Patron of Hollywood. Illustrated title page. Cloth notably sharp, notwithstanding mild rubbing and darkening of spine, spots of soiling to a couple of leaves. A near-fine copy. Slocum & Cahoon A3 (first variant). Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1992.

Chamber Music is James Joyce's first published work, a collection of lyrical poems. The poems, written when Joyce was a young man in his early twenties, evoke the author's youthful infatuation with the lyrical tradition and his dissatisfaction with the impermanence and insincerity of the genre.