Exhibit Honors Gift of James Joyce Collection
Joycean Generosity, Joycean Books
On exhibit April 17 - June 30, 2009
Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room
Wilson Special Collections Library
Free and open to the public
Exhibit information: (919) 962-1143 or rbcref@email.unc.edu
A collection of books by twentieth-century Irish writer and poet James Joyce will be the highlight of Joycean Generosity, Joycean Books, an exhibition running April 17 through June 30 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Special Collections Library.
The Rare Book Collection exhibition honors gifts of James R. and Mary M. Patton to the UNC Library. In addition to thirty Joyce items, the exhibit will feature works by poets Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and James Dickey—all gifts of the Pattons. Dickey's work Deliverance was made into a successful movie in 1972.
Libby Chenault, rare book collection librarian, said the Patton-Joyce collection, which includes first editions, contains the most important pieces of Joycean writing, with the exception of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake.
"The books are impeccable," Chenault says. "Each copy is distinctive and the condition is almost as issued. This is the kind of collection that people who are interested in James Joyce dream about."
Some of the books on exhibit have inscriptions by Joyce, she said, including one to twentieth-century poet T.S. Eliot. In three of the books, James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, designed illuminated initials, which Stephen James Joyce, grandson of Joyce, has called "lettrines" (French for "initial capital letters").
The Joyce collection adds to the Rare Book Collection's strong collection of Irish literature, which includes works by four Nobel Prize laureates, William Butler Yeats (1923), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969), and Seamus Heaney (1995).
In 2005, the Pattons donated to UNC their copy of Ulysses, the twentieth of the first series of 100 volumes printed. A 1948 UNC graduate, James Patton made his first significant purchase as a student. He bought the forty-dollar-book, a first edition of The Californians by poet Robinson Jeffers, in the Bull's Head Bookshop, located at the time in Wilson Library.
Patton admitted he was sad to give up his Joyce collection. "But outweighing that is the pleasure of giving and knowing [the collection] will be cared for, viewed, and will inspire other people," he said.
Related Links
- Library to exhibit rare books by Joyce, others (release from UNC News Services)
- Scott Klein Lecture to Open Exhibit Joycean Generosity, Joycean Books
- Gallery Talks Spotlight Joycean Generosity, Joycean Books Exhibit
- Jim and Mary Patton: Collectors, Donors, Doers (article in Friends of the Library Windows magazine, Fall 2008, p. 3)
