The textual witnesses to Work in Progress / Finnegans Wake divide into drafts and notes. The drafts consist of the documents that make up the developing text itself: the evolution of each section of the work, from preliminary sketch to page proofs and final printed copy. The notebooks, as is now known, contain the lexical building blocks for these multiple draft stages.

Joyce's notebooks also provide a detailed, though indirect, record of a substantial period in the working life of one of Europe's greatest writers. From 1922, when he finished Ulysses, to the publication of Finnegans Wake in 1939, Joyce wrote and rewrote continuously, expanding, refining, and enriching his Work in Progress. He did not begin with a master plan; rather he gradually evolved his text out of an extraordinarily diverse corpus of materials collected in the notebooks. Thus the notebooks provide not only a fascinating body of material that can help to interpret a notoriously complex text but, more importantly perhaps, they furnish a detailed map of Joyce's creative engagement during the whole period of the work's development. This edition of the notebooks will allow for a critical investigation of a major writer's creative processes that may be unparalleled in the history of literary scholarship.

The raw notebook material derives from an encyclopaedic range of external sources - hundreds of books, pamphlets, and articles in journals and newspapers. The identification of this source material is crucial to understanding, and often simply deciphering, the notes themselves; but this process has been rendered especially difficult because Joyce rarely, if ever, indicates where he found his material. A complete catalog of the full range of topics of the source texts awaits the completion of the edition, but the editorial team have, to date, identified indexes relating to, inter alia, Atomic Physics, Botany, Cooking, Cricket, Dublin, Entomology, Exotic Languages (Afar, Checheno-Lesghien, Romansch, etc), Fashion, Foxhunting, Geometry, Horseracing, Irish History (Ancient, Mediaeval and Contemporary), Legal Cases, Linguistics (including Etymology, Linguistic History, and Slang), Literary notes (including notes on LeFanu, Mark Twain, MacPherson, etc., as well as contemporary writers such as Hemingway, O'Casey, O'Flaherty, Yeats, etc.), Magic, Mathematics, Music, Music Hall, Proverbs (Welsh, Irish, French, etc), Psychoanalysis, Religions (Confucianism, Mohammedism, Mormonism etc.), Rivers, Saints, Television, Theatre, Theology, Topography, and Wagner.

The text of Work in Progress / Finnegans Wake was painstakingly constructed out of a set of fragmentary episodes, which gradually came together to form sections, which were then integrated into chapters, which in their turn make up the bookÕs four parts. Each stage was fashioned using the raw material provided by one or several of the notebooks. The notebook material transferred into the text was cancelled with one of a range of colour crayons - each colour representing a run through the notes. In the early thirties, Madame Raphael, an amanuensis, recopied the unused (and thus uncrossed) items in the notebooks into a second series of notebooks, catalogued by Dr. Peter Spielberg as the C-series. A careful study of these notebooks revealed not only that some notebooks had been copied twice, but that Mme Raphael had copied a number of notebooks that are no longer extant.

In 1962, Peter Spielberg catalogued the notebooks in the following manner:

VI.A One large, atypical notebook in Joyce's hand, later known as Scribbledehobble, after its opening word.

VI.B.1-40, 42-48, The primary series, which consists of forty-seven small notebooks in various formats, written in Joyce's hand.
VI.B.48 was compiled after Finnegans Wake had been completed.

VI.B.41 Notes written by Joyce at the end of VI.C.18 (see below)

VI.C.1-18 Eighteen notebooks containing transcriptions by Madame Raphael of unused material from the B series that werer used by Joyce in the same manner as the B series.

VI.D.1-7 Virtual notebooks. These represent parts of VI.C.1-18, whose originals in the B series are no longer extant.