Finnegans Wake - Special Limited Edition in Leather

Full leather binding in black calfskin with full cloth slipcase, gilt-blocked design to front panel and lettering to spine. Off-white, mould-made, deckle edged 130 gram paper (30% rag). Pulp-coloured endleaves, Nettuno light 140 grams. Rounded and backed. Signed and numbered 1-150, lettered A-Z. The companion booklet gathering of introductory matter by Seamus Deane, Hans Walter Gabler, David Greetham and the editors is printed on mould-made paper and hardbound with stiff grey paper over boards, 64pp.

This critically emended Finnegans Wake, praised by Seamus Deane as ‘astonishing and pleasing beyond measure’, is now delivered to its reading public more than seventy years after the novel’s first publication by Faber & Faber on 4 May 1939.

Finnegans Wake is the most bookish of all books. John Bishop has described it as ‘the single most intentionally crafted literary artefact that our culture has produced’. In its original format, however, the book has been beset by numerous imperfections occasioned by the confusion of its seventeen year composition. Only today, by restoring to our view the author’s intentions in a physical book designed, printed and bound to the highest standards of the printers’ art, can the editors reveal in true detail James Joyce’s fourth, and last, masterwork.

This edition is the summation of thirty years’ intense engagement by textual scholars Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon verifying, codifying, collating and clarifying the 20,000 pages of notes, drafts, typescripts and proofs comprising James Joyce’s ‘litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlwords.’