Books from authors’ personal libraries have long attracted collectors, who have been willing to pay a premium for their association value. At least since the sale of Charles Dickens’s books in 1878, posthumously created bookplates or labels have been produced by booksellers and others to mark deceased authors’ book. The books of William Beckford, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, E. M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, William Morris, and Mark Twain, among others, have been specially plated in this fashion. Research libraries, stimulated by scholarly interest in authors’ personal libraries for their literary, historical, cultural, and bibliographical values, have acquired and specially plated authors’ entire libraries.

            The bookplate illustrated here was created in 1949, at the time of the exhibition and sale at the Librairie-Galerie La Hune in Paris of the books and manuscripts left in Paris by James Joyce at his death in 1941. During his youth, Joyce wrote his name and often a date and place in his books; while in Zurich during World War I, he stamped his books on their covers or preliminary pages with a large monogram stamp; and for a period of time in Paris, he used a seldom-noticed small monogram stamp on the inside of the rear covers of some of his books. But since Joyce did not plate his books and since many books in his library have no obvious sign of ownership, the “post mortem” bookplate placed in these books is often their only identifying mark.

            The printmaker and book illustrator Johnny Friedlaender was commissioned to produce the Joyce “post mortem” bookplate. Friedlaender was born in Pless, Silesia, in 1912. A refugee from Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Friedlaender ultimately settled in Paris in 1945. His earliest Paris exhibitions were at the Galerie La Hune in the late 1940s, at which time Friedlaender, not yet a printmaker of international stature, accepted the commission from La Hune owner, Bernard Gheerbrant, to produce the Joyce bookplate.

            This armorial bookplate is somewhat unusual for its type; most posthumous designs are simple, undecorated, printed labels. For this handsome plate (uncharacteristic of his other work) Friedlaender copied exactly the drawing of the Joyce coat of arms, which had been one of Joyce’s treasured possessions. This was the pen-and-ink colored drawing that had earlier served as a model for the back cover design of the manuscript of Chamber Music (Joyce’s early book of poems), which Joyce had had specially bound for his wife as a Christmas present in 1909. The arms (“An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed” as described in Ulysses) are a variant of the arms of the Galway Joyces, an ancient family from whom most Irish Joyces claim descent. The crest (a demi-wolf rampant argent ducally gorged or) and the motto beneath the arms (Mors aut honorabilis vita: Death or life with honor) are those of the Galway Joyces. Since Irish heraldic practice is much less restrictive than the English, the question of whether or not James Joyce’s family was entitled to bear arms or simply appropriated them is not an issue.

            The bookplate is an etching with added aquatint; the artist’s initials are etched in the plate. The earliest of these has neither the added aquatint (in the two examples seen, these areas are hand-colored red) nor the artist's initials. A second state (of which only one example is known) has the artist's initials and aqua-tinting (although color has also been hand-applied to these areas), but the platemark retains the square corners of the first state. In examples of the third state (by far the most common) the platemark has bevelled edges and rounded corners; the plate was perhaps steel-coated for this printing. In addition to these variations, a small number of the bookplates have been signed in pencil by the artist.

            There is some indication that the different states were created for different purposes. The early announcements about the sale mentioned copies of the bookplates accompanying a limited edition of the catalog; it may be that the few signed plates were intended for that purpose. There is also an indication that the uncolored plate was intended for duplicate books, which were offered for sale separately. In any event, whatever the original intent, the distinction was not carried out and there is no discernible pattern in the books today.

            The saga of the books in the La Hune exhibition and sale is an interesting one. They were for the most part acquired by Joyce after he left Trieste in mid-1920. Before leaving Trieste, where he had lived (except for a wartime sojourn in Zurich) since 1905, Joyce had sent on to Paris a case of books he thought he would need to complete Ulysses (finally published on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday). Over the next two decades, after Paris became a more or less permanent residence, Joyce asked his brother Stanislaus, who had remained in Trieste, to send certain of the books left behind. The bulk of his Trieste library Joyce was never, however, to see again (this now at the University of Texas). In 1939, when Joyce moved to a smaller Paris flat, he disposed of some 2,000 of his books to friends and hospitals. The remaining books were in the Paris flat at Joyce’s death in early 1941 in Zurich, where he had sought refuge from Nazi-occupied Paris. The owner of the flat, for which rent was overdue, seized its contents, most of which were sold (illegally) at auction at the Hôtel Drouot in March 1941. Joyce’s friend Paul Léon had managed, with the help of his handyman, to rescue two pushcarts full of important Joyce papers from the apartment, and at the sale itself he was able to buy back about 70 percent of Joyce’s books with money provided by Mme Léon’s brother. The rescued books, papers, and Joyce family portraits were stored in the attic of a friend for eight years. Why the Joyce materials remained unrecovered for so long is not clear, but Paul Léon died a victim of Nazi anti-Semitism in a prison camp in 1942, and it is possible that the friend who stored the materials was unaware of their importance. The literary value of the recovered cache of Joyce materials was quickly apparent. They were sorted and organized (it took two librarians five weeks to sort, list, cover in blue protective wrappings, label, and catalog the books), described in a richly annotated catalog, and exhibited in October and November 1949.

            In 1950 virtually all these books and manuscripts were purchased for the Lockwood Memorial Library at the University of Buffalo (now the Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the State University of New York at Buffalo), whose librarian Charles D. Abbott had been among the first to recognize the importance of author’s notes, worksheets, and early drafts for the study of his published works. The Joyce manuscripts at Buffalo constitute a unique resource for the study of the creative process, “the smithy”, that produced Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Joyce’s personal library, at Buffalo, of approximately 400 book titles and about 150 periodicals and miscellaneous pamphlets includes presentation copies from many of his contemporaries, Joyce’s copies of his own works, and his working library, which provides invaluable information about his intellectual sources.

            A second Joyce library, the books he had during his residence in Trieste and in Zurich between 1905 and 1920, was recovered in the 1970s and is now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. A bookplate incorporating the book stamp Joyce used in Zurich was designed for this collection of nearly 600 titles by David Price of the Publications Office of the University of Texas.

Erik Bradford Stocker

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

University of Texas at Austin