transition stories Twenty-three Stories from transition - Eugene Jolas, Robert Sage (editors) 1929 - Walter V. McKee, New York - First Edition ‘It is necessary to break up the word, to construct an organic world of the imagination, and to give life a changed and spontaneous reality.’ – Eugene Jolas, from his preface.

The first collection of stories from avant-garde, inter-war literary journal,
transition, featuring works by Kay Boyle, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Eliiot Paul, and Philippe Soupault and others, together with segments of James Joyce’s then-unfinished novel, Finnegan’s Wake, published here as ‘A Muster from Work in Progress.’

Founded in 1927 in Paris by poet Eugene Jolas (himself aided by expatriate bookseller Sylvia Beach and ‘lost generation’ bon vivant Harry Crosby),
transition ran until the spring of 1938. In that 11 years and 27 issues – its experimental bent always unapologetically overt – the journal amassed an astounding pool of works by a trans-national cadre of writers, Surrealists, political activists, Dadaists, critics, and artists including Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, Picasso, William Carlos Williams, Juan Gris, Man Ray, Dylan Thomas, Joan Miró, and Paul Bowles, among many others, and as such, publishing for the first time some of the most linguistically and visually innovative art of the modern era.
  References: ‘Transition’ The Newberry Chicago Research Library, web. ‘Albert Schiller: Genius with Type Ornaments’ Rochester Institute of Technology web. ‘Irvinbg Politzer’ Modern Library Dust Jackets, web.

Octavo (book size 19.6x13.3cm), pp. xii 354 [2]. Publisher’s black cloth spine lettered in orange over striking illustrated boards in white, black and orange designed by respected advertising typographer Albert Schiller, orange-red top stain, in original Irving Politzer designed dust jacket in orange, black, and white, and priced ‘$2.50’ to upper front flap.
  Condition: Fine in near fine dust jacket, toning to spine, short closed tear to upper edge of moderately toned rear panel.   Ref: 110080   Price: HK$ 3,500