ULYSSES

First edition, first printing. Numbered 404 of 750 copies printed on handmade vergé à barbes paper. Publisher's original blue wrappers with titles in white to the upper cover. A fine copy, the wrappers unusually bright, only faintly toned and creased with minimal rubbing to extremities. The contents, unopened, are clean throughout. A remarkable, entirely unsophisticated copy. Housed in a bespoke blue cloth solander case.

Rare with the distinctive blue wrappers so beautifully well-preserved. Sylvia Beach's notebook records that this copy was bough on 24 February, just three weeks after publication, by the American modernist painter Charles Demuth. Demuth (1883-1935) was one of the first American artists to come into contact with the European avant-garde. From 1907, he made several trips to Paris, during which he attended at Académie Colarossi and Académie Julian and became acquainted with Alfred Stieglitz. The openly gay Demuth often depicted homoerotic scenes in his watercolours, as well as still lifes and the architecture of his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He exhibited at Stieglitz's gallery An American Place in the 1920s, and through him became acquainted with Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and cubism. Demuth's art was greatly influenced by the expatriate writers and artists he met in Paris. He created abstract "poster portraits" of O'Keeffe, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams - the latter's imagist poem "The Great Figure" inspired Demuth's most famous painting, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928). "Robert Locher, Demuth's lifelong friend, recalled that Charles thought a great deal of Gertrude Stein and often went to her studio in Paris. Marcel Duchamp, who befriended Demuth through [Walter Conrad] Arensberg's salon, also commented that, in his opinion, the authors Gertrude Stein and James Joyce influenced Charles most" (Bridgman, p. 20). Demuth eagerly anticipated the publication of Ulysses, writing to Eugene O'Neill on 17 September 1921: "Joyce is here. I'm going to see him soon with some of the English. His book, part of which came out in the Little Review, is about to come out, privately printed - 150 francs if you should want one" (Demuth, p. 24). Following Demuth's death in 1935, his copy passed to his mother, and subsequently to the American art critic Henry McBride (1867-1962). The first edition of Ulysses, published on the 2nd of February 1922 comprised 1000 copies in three states. Copies 1 to 100 were signed by Joyce and printed on Dutch handmade paper; copies numbered 101 to 250 (unsigned, large paper) were printed on vergé d'Arches; copies 251 to 1000 printed on vergé à barbes formed the smaller trade issue. (Slocum & Cahoon A17; Connolly 100; Elena Bridgman, Still Lifes of Charles Demuth, 1988; Charles Demuth, Letters, ed. by Bruce Kellner, 2000).