James Joyce: A Life in Books – handsome volume does justice to remarkable collection

James Joyce A Life in Books: The Desmond J Green Collection

Author: Luca Crispi

ISBN-13: 978-1739608682

Publisher: Martello Publishing

Guideline Price: € 75; 294pp

Desmond J Green is an Irish businessman and engineering graduate who has for many years collected important editions of works by James Joyce. The collection began in the 1970s but became more focused and more obsessive in later years, especially with the help of Cathach Books (now Ulysses Rare Books) in Dublin, the source of many of the items listed here.

Initially the editions collected (it consists mainly, though not exclusively, of editions – but also some Joyce letters and other items) were acquired on a random basis, as things became available.

Matters changed when Green met Luca Crispi, associate professor of James Joyce studies and modernism at UCD. Crispi helped to systematise Green’s magpie gathering, pointing out some gaps. The result is a very nearly complete collection of Joyce’s works published during his lifetime, including various interim serialisations and booklets.

It is a quite remarkable achievement – one boggles at the amount the whole collection must have cost – and it is done justice in this very handsome volume, continuing a certain tradition of “luxury modernism”, which records the accumulation of what is in fact still a work in progress.

Crispi’s work here is more than just an enumeration of each item in Green’s possession. It is a complete descriptive catalogue of these works, their publication history, their bibliographical status, their provenance and of course their contents. It is regrettable that for some items the reader has to be referred to a separate article by Crispi, available on a (free) website, for full information: this has no doubt occurred in order to keep the book and its cost within manageable limits. All in all, though, this catalogue is a considerable scholarly achievement.

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One could pick many instances of fascinating acquisitions in this very rich collection: among them, as an example, is the complete run of the New York journal The Little Review which carried instalments of Ulysses until it was suppressed in 1921. And there are no fewer than four copies of the first edition.

The bulk of the collection is now in the safe keeping of the National Library, with some items on display in the Museum of Literature Ireland. It is to be hoped that it will in time become part of the national heritage, with the collector’s name suitably enshrined.