What you will see

Irish Room

Joyce’s familial, historical and social context through dozens of family oil and watercolor portraits, sketches, scores of personal photographs, the author’s private library, left behind when he left Paris for Zurich at the outbreak of the Second World War, personal items like his eyeglasses and walking canes.

“Ulysses” Room

Materials that vividly illustrate the production, publication and reception of “Ulysses”; a display that visually demonstrates how the Circe chapter of the novel, set in Dublin’s red-light district, was constructed from notebook jottings to drafts to handwritten manuscripts, to typescripts (endlessly revised and corrected) to printers proofs (also corrected) to final printed edition; later editions of “Ulysses,” including the 1935 edition illustrated by six soft ground Matisse etchings (from one of the 20th-century's most desirable illustrated books, combining the work of two great modern artists); early editions of Joyce’s “Pomes Penyeach”; letters other material relative to his intrepid publisher Sylvia Beach, and other illuminating cultural ephemera, including letters to Beach from pursuers of “French” or erotic books, who believed “Ulysses” to be pornographic and wanted more of the same.

“Finnegans Wake” Room

Notebooks, typescripts and placards (proofs) of that notorious comic novel and its serializations, along with important photos and other material. First editions of late Joyce publications including “Anna Livia Plurabelle” and “Tales Told of Shem and Shaun” – both early installments of “Finnegans Wake.”