the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories
Dubliners
Richards, 1914.
First edition. Original maroon cloth with gilt titles to spine and upper cover. A very good copy with a little fading to the spine and a few faint splash marks to the upper cover. Internally clean with some foxing to the prelims and page edges. The gilt titles are bright and the binding crisp, a well preserved example of a susceptible book.
Joyce's unsurpassed collection of short stories, in which he attempts to 'present Dublin to the world'. The book had a tortuous birth: it was to be Joyce's first published work and appear in 1906, but the publication was abandoned during printing due to disagreements between Joyce and his publishers regarding emendations. In defence of his writing, Joyce said famously in a letter to Richards "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass."
After the publication of Chamber Music in 1907 Joyce offered Dubliners to Elkin Mathews and upon rejection approached the Dublin publishers Maunsel. They printed an edition of 1000 copies in July 1910, but all but a few of the page proofs were burned by the printer because of "objectionable" passages in some of the stories. In 1913 Richards eventually agreed to publish the book in an edition of 1250 copies, 746 of which were bound up and the remaining 504 were sold to B.W.Huebsch to form the American edition. The book was published on 15th June, 1914.
Stock ID: 32678
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