“It was a great idea to bring them together; celebrities of the same generation, of similar virtuosity” - Monroe Wheeler on the Joyce-Matisse Ulysses
George Macy’s decision to commission Henri Matisse to illustrate Ulysses was a bold move for his fledgling Limited Editions Club in 1935. Scandal still swirled around James Joyce’s masterpiece, which had been banned in the United States until 1933. In preliminary conversation with Macy, Matisse confessed to not having read Ulysses; Macy provided him with a French translation. “The very next morning, M. Matisse reported that he had read the book, that he understood its eighteen episodes to be parodies of similar episodes in the Odyssey, that he would like to give point to this fact by making his illustrations actually illustrations of the original episodes in Homer!” (Macy).
Matisse created 26 beautiful full-page illustrations, including six soft-ground etchings – his only use of that particular medium. Macy had planned for 1500 copies of the work to be produced and signed by both author and illustrator. Matisse signed all 1500, but legend has it that when Joyce realized that Matisse had been working from Homer’s Odyssey rather than his novel, he refused to sign any more than the 250 or so that he had already signed – making double-signed copies of this lavish illustrated edition very scarce.
We often carry copies of this collaboration between two of the 20th-century’s finest artists, one of the great modern illustrated books, signed by both author and illustrator. Browse our current inventory.
“America’s First Great Scientific Contribution”
In his Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia, Franklin offered the first clear evidence that lightning is an electrical phenomenon: “the greatest [discovery], perhaps, since the time of Isaac Newton” (Priestly). Included in this renowned work are accounts of Franklin’s famous kite and key experiment, his work with Leyden jars, lightning rods and charged clouds.
Since Oscar wrote Dorian Gray,” his wife said, “no one will speak to us.” Many critics attacked the work for being immoral, to which Wilde responded, “Leave my book, I beg you, to the immortality that it deserves” (Mason 328). But he also substantially revised the work for book publication, adding six new chapters.
Dickens supervised every aspect of the book’s elaborate production, resulting in a beautiful volume in cloth-gilt with John Leech’s hand-colored illustrations. A resounding success from the time of its publication, the entire first edition of 6000 copies sold out by the end of Christmas Day in 1843.
“The glimpses Rackham provides of stylized London reality effectively set off the fairy life that exists in unsuspected conjunction with it, and he captures the loveliness of the Gardens themselves with masterly skill” (Ray).
While he had published a number of books prior to the war, this was the work that would seal his literary reputation. Published separately from 1948-1954, the six volumes in Churchill’s masterpiece achieved immediate popularity in both Britain and the United States and earned Churchill the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1953. 