TRANSITION - Numbers 1-27

Paris: Transition / Shakespeare and Company, 1938. First edition. Very good to near fine overall.. Complete run of Eugene and Maria Jolas's landmark literary journal, which - along with Margaret Anderson's THE LITTLE REVIEW - was one of the primary vehicles of Modernist and experimental writing. Over the course of 11 years, often times under great financial difficulty, they published a who's-who of modernist and experimental authors, alongside the work of Surrealist, Expressionist, and Dada artists: "TRANSITION would explore the literary currents washing over Europe and America, present them all if they showed 'imaginative emancipation' as against descriptive naturalism" (Hoffman). 

Beginning with the very first issue, they published several portions of James Joyce's Work in Progress (Finnegans Wake), and notably, Jolas's English translation of Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS, which appeared in issues 24-26. Contributors across other issues include Kay Boyle, Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, Hilda Doolittle, Paul Bowles, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Bob Brown, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, André Breton, André Gide, Marcel Duchamp, and others.

A notoriously fragile publication, with complete sets in original condition seldom encountered in commerce, TRANSITION is a difficult run to assemble - especially in original wrappers and in collectible condition. A rare monument to Modernism and the early avant garde. Twenty-seven issues bound in twenty-five volumes, early issues 7.5'' x 5.5'', later 8.6'' x 6''. Original typographic and pictorial wrappers all. Various paginations (circa 150-325 pages most). Most issues have light wear to extremities, gentle sunning to spines and wrappers, some of the usual tanning to text edges, with occasional small edge tears, and some dust-soil to wrappers; small loss to front wrapper on No.3, with some small nicks, tears, and attendant creases to the taller issues; a few issues with previous owners names, another half-dozen with occasional foxing or minor soil to spines or wrappers; No.18 with shallow loss to lower margin of one plate; in many volumes, pages are still unopened.