James Joyce Quarterly

Collecting rare books is a private, traditionally male-dominated endeavor. So, it was with great interest that I approached Annette Campbell-White's memoir: Beyond Market Value: A Memoir of Book Collecting and the World of Venture Capital. While Campbell-White writes clearly of her lifelong love of books and her rising fortunes as a venture capitalist, the text is disjointed and riddled with repetition. Each chapter reads as a stand-alone account of either her experience as a young professional at Hambrecht & Quist, an investment bank, or of a specific book acquisition. There is little connective tissue binding the chapters into a fluid story.

From the outset, Campbell-White explains that books were her closest friends and steadfast companions during a peripatetic childhood. Born in New Zealand, she lived with her parents and sister in Australia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Canada, and finally South Africa where she attended boarding school from the age of thirteen. Money, or the lack thereof, was another constant companion of her childhood. As Campbell-White's memoir evolves, it becomes clear that wealth and the psychological sanctuary books provide underpin her motivations as a collector.

Jobless and lonely in London in the early 1970s, Campbell-White recounts her purchase of a signed, limited edition of T. S. Eliot's "A Song for Simeon" as the key to her "finding the roots for which [she] was searching" (10).¹ Somehow, this little book of poetry meant that "Everything Was Going to Turn Out All Right" (11). Thus began a connectivity between book-collecting and Campbell-White's personal life and career trajectory. When describing her first major collection [End Page 411] based on Cyril Connolly's 1965 book, The Modern Movement,² she writes, "[T]he separate items in the collection were a parallel record of the course of my life and career up until the day when I sold it" at Sotheby's on 7 June 2007 (4).

As Campbell-White became more successful professionally, she developed into a more confident collector. She writes that, while she was well acquainted with many of the English prose writers and poets listed by Connolly in The Modern Movement, she had little knowledge of the French works listed. In time, she mastered not only texts by the French authors, but the way to bid at auctions at the Hôtel Drouot without an intermediary. The air of authority she exudes about her acumen was initially impressive, but I lost faith when I read her chapter on Ulysses.

The acquisition of a first edition of Ulysses is a momentous occasion for anyone. A purchase alone, however, does not confer automatic authority on the subject. Campbell-White's account of the publication history of Ulysses is so over-simplified as to be inaccurate. For example, Joyce did not originate the idea that the first edition should be divided into three paper types. Adrienne Monnier, along with the tradition of French book publishing, deserves that credit.³ Campbell-White also states that "copies of the first edition sent to the United States from France by mail were seized by the US Post Office and burned, which was the fate of the book in other parts of the Englishspeaking world as well" (73). Yes, a few copies of the 750 series that Sylvia Beach posted to the United States were seized, but the majority got through safely. Copies of the 100 and 150 series were successfully posted to Beach's childhood friend, Marion Mason Peter, who, in turn, reposted them to subscribers.⁴ As for copies of the first edition being seized and burned elsewhere in the English-speaking world, archival records do not bear this out. Perhaps, Campbell-White means to refer to the Egoist Press edition of five hundred replacement copies published by John Rodker in January 1923, which were...