Hardcover. 8vo. 308 pp. Light red boards, gold lettering to spine, very fine. Dj with mildest of wear to edges, small tear to upper spine, about fine. A surprisingly scarce copy in dustjacket of one of the most influential Joyce studies ever published.

From the library of the important American poet Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. His signature of ownership is on the ffe. 

In 1959, British Joyce scholar Atherton published The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a work he revised and expanded in 1974. A detailed study of the written sources Joyce used when composing Finnegans Wake and of the function these sources play in his wok, it had a seminal impact on Joyce scholarship, providing an important foundation for a range of subsequent studies of the diverse literary influences on Joyce's last work. Atherton also wrote the introduction and notes to the 1965 Heinemann edition of A Portrait of the Author as a Young Man.