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The James Joyce Collection, one of the most distinguished in any library, came to The Poetry Collection in four installments. In 1949, the Librairie La Hune in Paris mounted a Joyce exposition, which featured a substantial body of manuscripts. All these materials, including the family portraits of Joyce's great-grandparents and grandparents and Patrick Tuohy's portraits of Joyce himself and of his father, along with other items of memorabilia, arrived in Buffalo in 1950. This extraordinary collection was donated in memory of Philip J. Wickser by his wife Margaretta F. Wickser. Joyce's private library, as he packed it for storage when he left Paris in 1939 to avoid the Nazi occupation, is another part of the Wickser gift. Various notebooks used in the composition of Ulysses, as well as those used in writing Finnegans Wake, have attracted international scholarly attention. In the notebooks one can follow the growth of the novels, as Joyce crossed out lines and sections with colored pencils and re-wrote whole episodes into new notebooks. The diminishment of Joyce's eyesight is also apparent as the small, tight writing of the Ulysses notebooks expands to the large hand of the Wake notebooks. The second installment came from the purchase of Joyce materials from Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the book store Shakespeare & Company and the publisher of the first edition of Ulysses. This purchase was made possible by a generous gift from Constance and Walter Stafford. The third installment was given in 1951 and 1959 by B.W. Huebsch, publisher and associate of Joyce. The final installment arrived after the death of Sylvia Beach in 1962, again through the support of Constance and Walter Stafford, but also through the generosity of Mrs. Spencer Kittinger and the Friends of the Lockwood Memorial Library.

Since its arrival in Buffalo, the Joyce Collection has been the one most actively used by scholars from all over the world. Dozens of books and articles have depended on the authority of manuscript information available only in The Poetry Collection.

The printed portions of the Joyce Collection contain a complete set of first editions, including all issues and states of every book published by Joyce, and a very large number of his magazine appearances. His private library, which has been described in and is accessible through Thomas Connolly's The Personal Library of James Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography (1955), supports the first edition collection. Virtually all the literary criticism in book form about Joyce's work, and thousands of newspaper clippings are also present to facilitate research.

The manuscript collection has been described by Peter Spielberg in James Joyce's Manuscripts and Letters at the University of Buffalo: A Catalogue (1962), but a part of the materials from Sylvia Beach arrived too late in 1962 to be included. The collection centers around the drafts--both writing and revisions--of Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). There are notebooks in Joyce's hand for the first novel, followed by transcripts, with corrections and additions, succeeded by proof pages with some additions and corrections. For the second novel, there are notebooks in Joyce's large hand, including "Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake," ytranscriptions of the notebooks, some typescripts, galley proofs, page proofs, and finally Joyce's own copy of the book with his corrections. In support of these central manuscripts, there are documents for A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Joyce's lecture on Daniel Defoe. Hundreds of letters both to Sylvia Beach and Joyce, the most important of which are Joyce's own letters to Beach, substantiate the manuscript collection.

Sylvia Beach maintained records of the cost of printing Ulysses, and the amounts paid to Joyce; she also kept notes, subscription forms, and other attendant materials about the publication of the novel. Included here are the letters of John Quinn to Beach and Joyce about the trial involving Ulysses and The Little Review, about the purchase of copies of the first edition of Ulysses and their shipment to New York in the false bottom of a crate, as well as a detailed account of the sale of the manuscript of Ulysses at auction. Beach's correspondence with Darantiere about the printing of Ulysses contains information available from no other source. In addition, Beach also saved copies of the books Joyce presented to her. Her copy of Ulysses was inscribed on 2 February 1922, the date of both Joyce's birthday and the novel's publication. The poem, "Who is Sylvia," in Joyce's hand, is tipped in at the front, while the novel's schema in English is tipped in at the rear. Bound in blue morocco, this remains the most unusual and sumptuous copy of the book known. Over 150 photographs of Joyce and his family, as well as notebooks and sketch books of Lucia, Joyce's daughter, supplement the collection. A group of letters by Lucia Joyce, as well as her copy of the Random House edition of Ulysses, were recently added to the Joyce Collection.