Dubliners flock to Sotheby's auction preview

Yesterday, Dubliners came to look at their famous namesake, James Joyce's Dubliners. It was the star exhibit in a preview of the modern Irish literature element of Sotheby's forthcoming literature sale, which takes place in London on December 7th. For one day only, signed books and manuscripts by James Joyce, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde were on public display in a Dublin hotel.

The item attracting the most interest was the 1914 edition of Dubliners, inscribed by Joyce in 1929 to Jacob Schwartz, then the owner of London's Ulysses Bookshop.

It has come from the estate of deceased American academic Richard Morgan Kain and is one of only two such inscribed copies to have come on the market in the past 40 years.

The last inscribed copy to go to auction, complete with dust jacket, was sold in Christie's in 2002 for €180,000. This copy, while lacking a dust jacket, is estimated to fetch at least €169,000, such is its rarity.

"We have two major literature sales a year," said Sotheby's English literature expert, Dr Philip Errington. "We decided to bring the Irish books and manuscripts to Dublin because there was such interest when we showed the Joyce papers here previously."

One special item in the Yeats editions links the poet, his father, his artist brother Jack B Yeats, his wife and a family friend, and is attracting a lot of pre-auction interest. The 1889 edition of Poems was inscribed by WB Yeats to his father Jack the same year. This page also carries a later inscription, dated 1949, by WB Yeats's wife, George, who passed the book on to her friend, Irene Franks. And in an interesting twist, the book was found to contain a letter to Franks from Jack B Yeats the artist, thanking her for her letter of condolence on hearing of the poet's death. It is estimated at €23,000.

Also on show was part of the 340 items of correspondence between Beckett and his lifelong friends, the Polish-born French artist Henri Hayden and his wife Josette. Valued at between €220,000 and €300,000, it will be sold as one lot. Beckett, as was clear from the postcards on view yesterday, had a tortuously small hand and signed himself "Sam".

"Books are really quite robust," Dr Errington assured a potential Irish buyer, taking the rare copy of Dubliners out of its cabinet. But since this potential buyer was considering spending in the region of €169,000 for the book, was he a big fan of Dubliners? Well no, he confessed, rather sheepishly, he had never actually read it.