A Visually Striking, Award-Winning Artist's Book, One of 50 Copies of Sketches Joyce Mined for His Masterworks

THE EPIPHANIES. INTERPRETED BY SUSAN WEIL & MARJORIE VAN DYKE.

(ARTIST'S BOOK). JOYCE, JAMES.

(New York: Vincent FitzGerald & Company, 1987). 385 x 325 mm. (15 1/8 x 12 3/4"). 2 p.l., 40 pp., [5] leaves. No. 15 OF 50 COPIES for sale (and 15 Artists' Proofs).

Unbound as issued in original wraps with a portrait of Joyce on front cover, his round glasses cut out to reveal part of a collage on the opening leaf. Housed in a clamshell box by David Bourbeau of Thistle Bindery, this covered in burgundy-flecked taupe Japanese handmade silk woven for this box, upper cover with incised vertical line showing the profile of Joyce, this with silver Japanese tea paper peeking through, spine with silver "JJ." With a total of 62 etchings, employing more than 150 plates, original watercolors, collage and hand cutting, some of the pieces folded into multiple sections, the artwork divided into four sections: "Dreams," "Games," "Planes," and "Death," each preceded by a title page also printed with the page numbers of the texts that inspired the art. Printed on Moulin du Gue paper; section title leaves for illustrations wrapped with Japanese paper. SIGNED in the colophon by Weil and Van Dyke. See: E. Brunazzi, "Susan Weil's Art of Joycean Illumination," in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1/2, Joyce's Women (Fall, 1996 - Winter, 1997), pp. 121-34. In pristine condition.

With a very strictly limited press run, this collection of carefully crafted sketches by Joyce is offered here as an important artist's book honored as one of the best illustrated productions of its time. Compiled after Joyce's death and first published in 1956, the text here consists of 40 short but polished fragments in prose and poetry the author put together between 1901-04 and then drew on in the composition of his major works, "Dubliners," "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Ulysses," and Finnegans Wake." "Epiphanies" was an appropriate choice for the present striking production, since our publisher Vincent FitzGerald aimed to produce deluxe publications in the mode of the French livres d'artiste by facilitating an artistic environment like that of Paris in 1920s. And so when he asked his friends Susan Weil and Marjorie Van Dyke what writer's work they would like to illustrate, they immediately chose Joyce, one of brightest lights of 1920s Paris. Weil was a longtime Joyce devotee, and suggested his little-known "Epiphanies" for their first project, since these notes and ideas provided material for some of his greatest books. As Weil said, "'The Epiphanies' seemed so perfect. Words were released like a flock of birds to roost in Joyce's future works." Elizabeth Brunazzi tells us that "FitzGerald challenged Weil and Van Dyke to create an innovative relationship among the visual images responding to the verbal texts; to make them 'flow' one into the other rather than present them frame by frame as in an illustrated work; and thus to create a novel, organic form for the visual text and a different interpretation of the 'artist's book' altogether." The result is a work where the "illustrations" are not static, but are intended to be manipulated by the reader in order to fully reveal themselves. Weil and Van Dyke independently produced images for each of the 40 "Epiphanies," then began dividing the contributions into four themes: "Dreams," "Planes," "Games," and "Death." Both employed a variety of techniques, including watercolor, etching, collage, and paper cut-outs, and worked with other artists to refine and produce their final works. Brunazzi says that the present production results in the reader beginning "to rediscover and explore the frontiers of textuality, much as a child first encounters a book as a beloved physical object incorporating physical images, both tactile and visual." The resulting book was chosen by the Independent Curators for the Franklin Furnace exhibition "Contemporary Illustrated Books" as one of the 50 best illustrated books from 1966-88, and was featured in the Boston Athenaeum exhibition "Artists of the Book, 1988, A Facet of Modernism.". (ST21186)

Price: $7,800.00