First edition of Ulysses sells for record £275,000
Well-preserved copy of James Joyce’s 1922 classic had been unread, except for the racy bits
A first edition copy of the book Ulysees by James Joyce, on sale at Antiquarian Book Fair, Olympia, London. Photograph: Martin Argles/Guardian
If you’re going to read any of Ulysses then it might as well be the racy bits at the end. And so it was with a fabulously rare first edition of theJames Joyce novel which today sold for £275,000, the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.
The astonishingly well-preserved and previously lost edition of the book, bought surreptitiously in a Manhattan bookshop despite it being banned in the US, was sold to a private buyer in London on the opening day of one of the world’s biggest antiquarian book fairs.
Ulysses, hailed by some as a modernist masterpiece, follows the events of one day and is one of those novels that people often never quite get round to finishing, or in many cases starting.
Joyce’s vast novel was met with bafflement and anger when it was first published in 1922 with one reviewer complaining that it “appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine”.
The more salacious bits are in the last episode, where Molly Bloom’s long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy ends in her orgasmic “yes I said yes I will Yes”.
This first edition is unopened – apart from that last episode. The copy is number 45 of the first 100 and is printed on fine Dutch handmade paper.