Joyce, James | Joyce's first extant publication

Joyce, James
The Holy Office. [Pola, late 1904/early 1905]

Broadside (289 x 219 mm) on paper (watermarked eagle | L. P. | Mercantil Eagle Paper). Text in two columns separated by thin rule and surmounted by a decorative rule, signed in type at foot of second column "James A. Joyce"; slightest creasing at lower margin. Black morocco folding-case gilt.

A fine copy of Joyce's rare and fragile first extant publication. The Palo printing of The Holy Office may have been preceded by Et Tu, Healy!, a poem written by Joyce at the age of nine and supposed to have been printed by his father, and by a Dublin edition of The Holy Office, but no copy of either of those publications has been discovered.

The Holy Office—a scabrous attack on members of the Irish Literary Revival and other literary compatriots, and a declaration of his own alternative aesthetic—was printed at Joyce's expense, probably in an edition of fewer than one hundred copies, in Pola (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) between November 1904 and March 1905. Copies were then sent by the author to Russell, Gogarty, Colum, and other targets of the piece in Dublin. The poem had been written in Dublin in the summer of 1904 before Joyce and Nora's elopement to the Continent. Joyce initially sent it to Constantine Curran, editor of the University College magazine St. Stephen's, but the editor returned the "unholy thing" to the author with a humorous letter on 8 August; Joyce then undertook to publish the broadside himself, but when the printer, at the end of the same month, asked him to pay for the broadsheets and to collect them, he could not find the money (see Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, pp. 165–167).

REFERENCE
Slocum & Cahoon A2

Condition Report:
Condition as described in catalogue entry.