Wikicollecting Top 10 most expensive modern first editions Wikicollecting.org, the online collectibles encyclopaedia, presents a list of the ten most expensive modern first edition books ever sold at auction.
and is one of just four novels Fitzgerald completed.
1. Ulysses, James Joyce - $460,000
Ulysses was met with scepticism and bewilderment when Joyce first approached publishers with it in the early 1920s, a feeling that many readers of the novel can sympathise with. The book is heavy going but beloved by those with the perseverance to keep going.
First published on February 2, 1922, on Joyce’s 40th birthday, a mere 1,000 copies were printed by the Paris-based Shakespeare and Company.
Of those 1,000, two copies were signed by Joyce. One of these resides at the Macroom Library in Cork, Ireland. The other was sold at Christie's for $460,000 in 2002, comfortably beating its $300,000 high-end estimate.
Joyce wrote in the inscription: "To Henry Kaeser James Joyce Dijon 12 October 1922". Kaeser was the man who published the second edition of the work, on the date of the inscription.
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