Finnegans Wake

by

James Joyce

photos by Marco Warmuth

Faber & Faber, London 1939
first edition, first imprint

247 x 165 x 45 mm

now to be found in the collection:

for sale

The binding:

Full leather binding in bottle green goatskin with leather joints and sewn grey-blue silk headbands. The edges of the book were left in the original state of publication with the for-edge and foot cut open and the head decorated in a light yellow (the latter was freshened up a little, as the colour had faded over time). The bord-à-bord doublures are matt silver (with a hint of rose) paper and pitched against aubergine-silver flyleaves. The book is housed in a green leather chemise with inlaid paper sides in light (glossy) and dark (matt) silver paper. Book and chemise live in a metallic green slipcase, lined with grey-green Alcantara. All papers used are hand-dyed.

The books’ design is tooled with a free play of lines in two shades of red/pink pigment, some arrow like shapes in two shades of yellow, and a flurry of ovals (and oblong relatives) in three shades of silver. The book and chemise are titled in matt-silver pearl foil on the spine.

The group rests in a drop-back box which doubles as the artwork’s trousseau. The imbedded drawer contains the tooling master templates of the design. The trousseau is covered with a fabric dyed by hand to a light shade of pink and lined with pink Alcantara.

The novel:

Finnegans Wake is the final work by James Joyce and written over the course of seventeen years. Joyce developed an idiosyncratic language for this novel that blends ‚legible‘ words and sentences with ‚made-up’ syllables and wordcreations. When reading the text aloud the spoken ‚words‘ reveal phonetic links to other languages and puns, creating rhythm and pace, flying off into all directions. However, an actual meaning remains tantalising obscure. This is in itself quite beautiful.

When I finally turned to Wikipedia to find out more, I had to laugh out loud, as it clearly was not only me who was puzzled:  ‘Despite the obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book’s central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot, but key details remain elusive’ [Wikipedia on Finnegans Wake, 2024]

bound 2024