JOYCE, James -- [Mabel Collins COOKE (1851-1927).] The Story of the Year. A Record of Feasts and Ceremonies . London: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. for George Redway, 1895. 12° (156 x 91mm). Original cloth, titled in yellow on the upper board and with a device composed of an ankh within a star-of-David enclosed by an uroboros (somewhat marked, more heavily on the spine, extremities a little rubbed and bumped, book block split); modern morocco-backed slipcase. Provenance : James Joyce (ownership inscription on front free endpaper 'Jas A Joyce , May. 1901.') FIRST EDITION. A RARE, VERY EARLY OWNERSHIP INSCRIPTION BY JOYCE ON A VOLUME FROM HIS LIBRARY, exemplifying his early interest in the occult. The present volume by the mysticist writer Mabel Collins Cooke is a remarkable memento of Joyce's exploration of the occult, a subject which enjoyed great interest in the final years of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth. As Joyce's literary interests broadened from Irish literature to encompass contemporary European writers such as Ibsen, Hauptmann, Verlaine and D'Annunzio, so types of religious experience other than the tradional Catholicism of his youth attracted his attention, not so much for their intrinsic spiritual propositions as for their symbolic possibilities (similarly, the writer's interest in and admiration for St Thomas Aquinas was not narrowly theological). This voracious eclecticism coincided with the interest of Dublin literary circles in occultism, although as Ellmann states, 'it is probable that [Joyce], like Yeats and unlike George Russell, was attracted more by the symbology than by the pious generalizations of Theosophy' (R. Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: 1983), p. 76, also noting that Joyce owned a copy of H.S. Olcott's A Buddhist Catachism , acquired in the same month as this volume and dated 7 May 1901). THIS OWNERSHIP INSCRIPTION BY JOYCE IS EARLIER THAN ANY RECORDED AT AUCTION SINCE 1975, predating Joyce's signed copy of Yeats' John Sherman and Dhoya (dated 1902) and his copy of Beerbohm's More (1902).
JOYCE, James -- [Mabel Collins COOKE (1851-1927).] The Story of the Year. A Record of Feasts and Ceremonies . London: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. for George Redway, 1895. 12° (156 x 91mm). Original cloth, titled in yellow on the upper board and with a device composed of an ankh within a star-of-David enclosed by an uroboros (somewhat marked, more heavily on the spine, extremities a little rubbed and bumped, book block split); modern morocco-backed slipcase. Provenance : James Joyce (ownership inscription on front free endpaper 'Jas A Joyce , May. 1901.') FIRST EDITION. A RARE, VERY EARLY OWNERSHIP INSCRIPTION BY JOYCE ON A VOLUME FROM HIS LIBRARY, exemplifying his early interest in the occult. The present volume by the mysticist writer Mabel Collins Cooke is a remarkable memento of Joyce's exploration of the occult, a subject which enjoyed great interest in the final years of the nineteenth century and the early ones of the twentieth. As Joyce's literary interests broadened from Irish literature to encompass contemporary European writers such as Ibsen, Hauptmann, Verlaine and D'Annunzio, so types of religious experience other than the tradional Catholicism of his youth attracted his attention, not so much for their intrinsic spiritual propositions as for their symbolic possibilities (similarly, the writer's interest in and admiration for St Thomas Aquinas was not narrowly theological). This voracious eclecticism coincided with the interest of Dublin literary circles in occultism, although as Ellmann states, 'it is probable that [Joyce], like Yeats and unlike George Russell, was attracted more by the symbology than by the pious generalizations of Theosophy' (R. Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: 1983), p. 76, also noting that Joyce owned a copy of H.S. Olcott's A Buddhist Catachism , acquired in the same month as this volume and dated 7 May 1901). THIS OWNERSHIP INSCRIPTION BY JOYCE IS EARLIER THAN ANY RECORDED AT AUCTION SINCE 1975, predating Joyce's signed copy of Yeats' John Sherman and Dhoya (dated 1902) and his copy of Beerbohm's More (1902).
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