A rare copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, bound at the author’s request in the colours of the Greek flag. This is perhaps the strangest bequest in our list, not least because the Belfast playwright John Boyd did not know that the book would be bequeathed to the Irish people on his behalf after his death in 2002. He had bought it in Paris as a young man in 1935 and smuggled it back to Ireland, where the book was banned. He managed to fool customs by placing it inside a wooden box, on which he stencilled the words “sanitary towels”, an appropriately Joycean detail.