Collected Poems

First Edition. Copy #372 of 800 Numbered copies. Letterpress printed in navy italics on white wove paper, with a frontispiece portrait of the author by Augustus John. Foolscap octavo. Bound in cream-white boards decoratively stamped in blue, with blue satin place-marker, issued in a glassine wrapper. A Near Fine volume in a Good original glassine wrapper. Wrapper is age-toned and chipped at head and tail, with light tanning to the exposed portion of the spine. This copy belonged to the Arthur Conan Doyle scholar, John Bennett Shaw (and his bookplate is included but unattached).

A lovely example of James Joyce's collaboration with the small, artisan presses at work in the 1920s and 30s.

The Black Sun Press was an exemplary Parisian fine press publishing house which brought together a community of diverse artists to produce deluxe, hand-set editions capturing the modernist scene in the late twenties and thirties. Originally founded as Éditions Narcisse, the Black Sun Press issued limited editions of the first unexpurgated editions of D.H. Lawrence's 'Sun' and 'The Escaped Cock', Kay Boyle's 'Short Stories', Archibald MacLeish's 'Einstein', Eugene Jolas's 'Secession in Astropolis', a volume of 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses', and Hart Crane's 'The Bridge', and James Joyce's 'Tales Told of Shem and Shaun', among other works.