You Won't Believe This Incredible Art Edition Of James Joyce's Ulysses

by Stephen J. Gertz

James Joyce completed his novel, Ulysses, on October 30, 1921. Ninety years later, on October 30, 2011, Charlene Matthews, the Los Angeles-based book artist and bookbinder recently the subject of a profile in Studios magazine, began work on an extraordinary edition of the book, based upon Sylvia Beach's true first edition with all its typos included.

Two years later, on October 30, 2013, she completed it: the entire text of Ulysses - all of its approximately 265,000 words in eighteen episodes - transcribed by hand onto thirty-eight seven-foot tall, two-inch diameter poles: Ulysses as a landscape to physically move through; the novel as literary grove, Ulysses as trees of of life with language as fragrant, hallucinatory bark, and trunks reaching toward the sky.

Each pole has sixteen 'cels' comprised of four pages, a total of sixty-four pages per pole.  The first cel has the first line in it and then Matthews measured down 9" and wrote that line in the next cel and so on, with the last cel containing the last line on the pole. The whole totals thirty-eight poles.

I talked to Charlene Matthews about the piece, which I've observed in progress since she began. Our interview follows.

SJG: This project involved an extraordinary amount of work and time. What inspired you to begin?

CM: I had to do a sculptural piece for an art show Doug Harvey was doing at the Shoshanna Wayne Gallery.  So I wrote a J.G.Ballard short story (Say Goodbye to the Wind) on a pole I had in the back yard for years  which I hate to say was not very good.  I liked how it looked and I liked the idea of taking the words out of the book and putting them onto an object, I stayed with the pole.  I went through my book collection and found Ulysses.  Nothing else would do but IT, and I had never read it.

Key to the poles.

SJG: Did you have any idea when you began just how all-consuming it would turn-out to become?

CM: I knew the project would take me a while, I researched poles and pens and jumped in. As problems occurred I solved them, like how to write and turn the pole smoothly, how to write without twisting my back, how to exercise my hands to keep them from cramping, how to sand the pole just so to accommodate smooth writing.  The eventual  get-up I rigged was pretty amusing. I also began mapping the characters' movements on my walls.

All typos included, as well as flaws in the medium.

SJG: What is the over-riding theme here? What was/is your intent? In short (from a philistine perspective), what's the point?

CM: Initially I envisioned just a large group of poles standing around with writing on them.  But as I was writing, I had visions of the poles being exhibited in many ways, I am going to publish a small edition book of these drawings this year.  Some of them are pretty basic, most are pretty out there ( Irish Jig Dancers, energy windmills, mirrors etc.).

Also, as I was writing my eyes would look at my process and get memorized in the patterns made by the black pen letters on the wood grain, the letters moving around, the grain going up and down. I saw pictures of faces, and animals and odd formations.

The point?  I wanted to make something beautiful.  That is how I chose to spend my time at night.  I did have some very personal reasons for doing this, but they are moot.  It really is just my most current book art project.

Basically the book is all about sex.  I have A LOT to say about this.

SJG: It seems that the process must have in some way paralleled Bloom's journey, his a walk through Dublin, yours a walk through Joyce. Anything to that?

CM: It definitely felt like I was having a love affair with Joyce. 

SJG: You've read the book, a work of art in and of itself. You've turned it into a work of art in another medium. How has it changed your perspective on the book?

CM: As I was absorbing the story, I was also observing his style, and method of storytelling. I understood what was going on in his head as a story teller, writer and artist.  What he was trying to achieve in his Modernism.  This is when I knew that the book had more than a plot line, it had a picture line, the movements of everyone if they could be seen over head would draw out symbols/pictures.  As I was taking the words off the page, I was in this fourth dimension with Joyce.

Draft schematic plan for exhibition.

SJG: And for the viewer/reader, what is it you expect or hope from them? What do you want people to take away from the experience?

CM: What I want people to take away from seeing the poles is the magic of the hand written word, the beauty of handwriting.  The beauty of a handmade object only they can create, by hand writing.

SJG: Are you looking for or have you found an exhibition space for the piece? Any interest yet from galleries?

CM: I am talking to people about exhibiting them, and welcome any inquiries. Depending on the space will depend on how to show them.  Either anchored to the floor or hanging from the ceiling. All can be done.

Pole #38, with last line.

SJG: You said that "basically the book is all about sex.  I have A LOT to say about this." You can't declare that and not pay it off.

CM: Spoiler Alert! It covers every angle of human sexuality. One interesting point about the Ulysses obscenity trial in America is that the case was won the day after Prohibition was lifted.

•  •  •

The case was won on December 6, 1933. Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933 when the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealing the 18th Amendment was ratified.

"...And what is cheese? Corpse of milk" - James Joyce, Ulysses . 

And what is Charlene Matthews' Ulysses? Copse of novel.

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Images courtesy of Charlene Matthews, with our thanks.
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The Most Notorious Publisher In American History

by Stephen J. Gertz

He stood at the crossroads of Modernism and censorship, twentieth century literature, copyright law, and cultural history. He introduced America to James Joyce's Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, Alfred Jarry's The Garden of Priapus, etc. He also published Loose Shoulder Straps by "Alain Dubois" aka poet, litterateur, and author of The Rhyming Dictionary, Clement Wood; Padlocks and Girdles of Chastity by Alcide Bonneau (1928); Sacred Prostitution and Marriage By Capture (1932); Lady Chatterley's Husbands (1931, written by Antony Gudaitis, aka Tony Gud);  and the famed homoerotic novel, A Scarlet Pansy (1932 deluxe issue, by "Robert Scully," almost surely poet Robert McAlmon, with a 1933 trade edition). He edited and published Two Worlds, a hardbound literary quarterly whose contributing editors were Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford. He was a master of mail-order book sales. The list of imprints he established is as long as a leg. He was Jean Valjean to New York Society For the Supression of Vice leader John S. Sumner's Javert. He spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions. He gave his name to a  key Supreme Court 1st Amendment decision. Samuel Roth's personal and professional activities - they were one and the same - ultimately allowed Americans to read whatever they wanted to; his sacrifice at the Court in 1957 made it safe for U.S. citizens to buy legal American copies of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1958 and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1959 without Mrs. Grundy at their door with SWAT team and incinerator.

Roth, at right, in his Poetry Book Shop, Greenwich Village 1920.

"Samuel Roth…was a man of considerable culture. Some of the material he sold was trash; some of it was unquestionably literature" (Charles Rembar). He believed that "reading is itself is a great good, any kind of reading is better than no reading and some people will read only rather low material, which I am willing to supply" (Samuel Roth, as paraphrased by his attorney, Charles Rembar, in his The End of Obscenity).

Sam Roth (1893-1974), if he is remembered at all, is infamous for his literary piracies. After he serially published twelve excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses without authorization in Two Worlds, Sylvia Beach, who had published the first edition of Ulysses in Paris, at Joyce's behest organized an international protest in 1927 against Roth with 167 internationally respected intellectuals and artists signing the document, including Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Albert Einstein. He was immediately vilified. This incident has deeply scarred Roth's legacy. Jay A. Gertzman, with evidence not available to earlier scholars, makes a strong case for reappraising Samuel Roth's guilt, both legal and ethical, in a new and definitive biography.

Issue 1, No. 1, December, 1925.

Gertzman, who in his Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940 (1999), exposed the edgy world of the clandestine, East Coast-U.S. publication of sexually-themed literature, has now, after at least fifteen years of research, published this long-awaited biography of Roth, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist, the first deeply researched, full-length investigation of the man and his milieu.

Samuel Roth.

Grade C-Z moviemakers were once consigned to Gower Gulch, a low-rent, run-down section of Hollywood near the major studios but a light year distant from their  superior quality; it was also known as Poverty Row. Brazen upstarts, outsiders, and finaglers with ambition but little money and desperate to distribute their product through a system dominated by the big studios vied for the eyeballs of movie-goers. New York publishers short on cash but long on brash found themselves in similar circumstances. Being proudly Jewish and thus not well-connected to or well-perceived by book publishing's elitist, gentile power-centers didn't help. Having a constitutional attraction to literature, modern and classical, fiction  and non-fiction that defied contemporary moral standards was certainly a disadvantage. A strong anti-authoritarian streak and determination to publish and accept the consequences (but not without a fight) in concert with a fundamental aversion to censorship in a free society only made matters worse. Being a blatant huckster came with the territory; publishing was a Darwinian business. Easily victimized, you did what you had to do to survive. Roth, a downtown publisher with uptown aspirations, was all of these things, and a writer, too, a brilliant Columbia graduate with artistic pretensions and a voice for self-pity. Born in Galacia, he was raised on New York's Lower East Side, where chutzpah was sliced thick and Roth's portion super-sized.

Roth's mug shot, 1930, upon beginning his two-month prison
sentence for selling copies of Joyce's Ulysses in Philadelphia.

An outsider to begin with, the Ulysses controversy made him an outcast, a  pariah for his sin as "desecrater of literary expression." Gertzman carefully mounts a strong case that Roth was not the philistine he has been made out to be. 

• Roth did not "pirate" Ulysses. Because of a clause in contemporary U.S. copyright law written to protect the domestic printing trade, books that were not printed on an American-based press were not granted copyright protection. Ulysses was, within the U.S., in the public domain. Blame Congress.

• There is evidence that Joyce and Roth's mutual friend, Ezra Pound, acting as Joyce's literary agent, gave Roth the go-ahead, and that arrangements for payment had been made.

• Joyce's outrage was disingenuous. While sincerely trying to protect his image as avant-garde genius he was also a shrewd businessman not without keen commercial instincts. The furor of his friends and supporters was exaggerated. Edited excerpts of Ulysses had been previously published and no one complained about it. A managed protest could only increase awareness and build demand for the book's ultimate legal publication in full in the United States (Random House, 1934). Genius aesthete versus greedy capitalist barbarian always makes a good story.

• Joyce's concern that sales of the Beach edition of the book would be hurt by Roth's excerpts to a broad audience (Roth wanted his publications bought by the average man on the street; his overriding goal was to popularize literature of all kinds and get it to the hinterlands) was groundless and something of a canard. With its limited press run and price the Beach edition was never meant or expected to attract a broad readership beyond wealthy collectors.

Gertzman goes on in depth and what we take away is that there is plenty of blame to spread amongst the actors in this bit of literary theater. Roth was not a boogey-man. He was, to a large degree, the perfect scapegoat.

Sketch, undoubtedly by Mahlon Blaine, for an advertisement.

Are you aware that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a memoir concerning his incestuous relationship with his sister, Elisabeth? In 1951 Roth published My Sister and I (NY: Boar's Head) based upon a manuscript in Nietzsche's hand that fell into Roth's possession in 1924. Its first edition went through fourteen printings. He initially advertised its publication in 1924 but ran out of money (Roth never got rich publishing anything, much less Ulysses, and was always in a financial bind of some sort). After a raid on Roth's offices by John S. Sumner in 1929 the manuscript was thought lost. It resurfaced during a 1940s inventory. Real or apocryphal Nietzsche? Gertzman presents the critical arguments, strong on both sides. The jury remains out.

Roth was a big cat who, when wounded, roared and attacked, a Lion of Judah. He was a "steadfast Jew and Zionist...who became so distressed by what he felt was lack of support from his co-religionists that he, after claiming to be instructed by Jesus in a vision, wrote Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All Frontiers of Civilization, a vicious 325-page anti-Semitic tract that was used by Nazis for propaganda and is kept in print by right-wing white-supremacist groups today" (Michael Bronski).

NY: Golden Hind Press, 1934.

• • •

Thrill of the Trade Department:  around ten years ago I had Roth's personal copy of another publisher's piracy of A Scarlet Pansy (NY: Nesor [Rosen, backwards], 1937) pass through my hands. Within, Roth made penciled revisions, cuts, and expurgations for his planned reissue (NY: Royal, 1940). The book also possessed subsequent annotations by sexual folklorist and bibliographer Gershon Legman, who worked for Roth during the 1930s, recording what Roth was up to with this book, from Legman's library, acquired directly from his widow, Judith. I felt as if I was sitting next to Roth as he worked on the book. Thanks, GL.

• • •

Roth lost his 1957 appeal to the Supreme Court to vacate his 1956 conviction for obscenity; he went to jail. But he won the war. The Court's Constitutional test in Roth v. United States - that for a work to be judged obscene its "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" of the "average person, applying contemporary community standards" without any redeeming social value whatsoever opened the door to soft-porn. Soon, "redeeming social value" could be found in anything no matter how hard-core, particularly if publishers hired medical professionals or literary critics (real or otherwise) to write prefaces explaining why Doing It With Dad and Brother Dan While Mom Sings Hawaiian War Chant presents an intimate family interpersonal dynamic with deep psychological insight into the human condition and a penetrating sociological view of the exotic byways of love in an All-American metropolis, thus saving it from  Vice Squad condemnation.

Scholars and citizens with an interest in modern literature and the struggle for frank expression and publication of  candid material in a free society will be captivated by Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist. I believe every library should own a copy; it's a must-acquire. For those fascinated by the shadow world of clandestine publishing and modern lit. in the U.S. it's a must-read.

But it's not a free read; you have to pay for it and that's how it should be. Yet at $74.95 it may be a bit too un-free. Issued by University Press of Florida it's a case study of what has gone so wrong with university press and books-on-books publishing. While the volume is very attractive its production quality is not what you'd expect from a book costing $75. And the $75 cost is likely connected to its print run, which, given the current state of the market (dismal), cannot have been more than 500 copies.

I can't help but think that if Roth were alive and the publisher, the book would have been issued as a fine trade paperback for $25 in an initial print-run of 2,000 copies and distributed via mail order and through every newsstand location in the country with accompanying hard-sell suggestive and sensational hoopla and ballyhoo using every free marketing tool available to spread the word that this is a sizzler, a book the major publishers found too hot to handle, an important book on American literary and publishing history about the man who died so that Ulysses, Casanova Jr.'s Tales, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Pageant of Lust, and The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags (Roth's best-selling exposé of President Herbert Hoover, 1931) could live, and made it possible for the huddled masses to not only breathe but read free.

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GERTZMAN, Jay A. Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xxviii, 387, [1] pp. Illustrations throughout. Illustrated boards. $74.95. Release: 4/23/2013.

UPDATE: 
A PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT ($30 total) HAS BEEN EXTENDED THROUGH JUNE: Order online at http://www.upf.com/ book.asp?id=GERTZ001
This link will appear as: University Press of Florida: Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist
Click on “add cloth to cart”
Click on “apply code” (just above the “check out” button) and enter code: PP113
Follow ordering instructions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface

Chapter One: 1893-1916: From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University.

Chapter Two: 1917-1925: Prelude to an International Protest: A Rising, Pugnacious Man of Letters.

Chapter Three: 1925-27: “Damn his impertinence. Bloody Crook”: Roth Publishes Joyce.

Chapter Four: 1928-34: Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and Its Bankruptcy.

Chapter Five : 1934: Jews Must Live. “We Meet Our Destiny on the Road We Take To Avoid It”

Chapter Six 1934-39: A Stretch in the Federal Penitentiary.

Chapter Seven: 1940-1949: Roth Breaks Parole, Uncovers a Nazi Plot, Gives “Dame Post Office” Fits, and Tells His Own Story in Mail Order Advertising Copy.

Chapter Eight: 1949-1952: Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Celine, and Nietzsche.

Chapter Nine: 1952-57: The Windsors, Winchell, Kefauver: Back to Lewisburg.

Chapter Ten: 1958-74: “It Had Been a Long Time since Someone Like You Had Appeared In the World”: Roth Fulfills his Mission.

Appendix: Samuel Roth’s Imprints and Business Names.

Bibliography.

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Other books by Jay A. Gertzman:

A Descriptive Bibliography of Lady Chatterley's Lover. With Essays Toward a Publishing History of the Novel.

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940. 
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Full Disclosure: Mr. Gertzman and I are friends, and he kindly acknowledges me in the book as a source, however modest my contribution - and it was, indeed, very modest.

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Image of My Sister and I advertisement courtesy of Mr. Gertzman's website, with our thanks.
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When Ginsberg & Burroughs Met Samuel Beckett

by Stephen J. Gertz

"Vodka with Bill and lisping boyish wrinkled Samuel Beckett
  - he sang Joyce lyrics he heard from Joyce's lips."

On September 26, 1976, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, in Berlin to perform a reading of his work, wrote a postcard to his close friend/lover poet Peter Orlovsky.

Dear Peter -

Been here a week, went to zoo with Bill [William S. Burroughs], several afternoons in East Berlin learning Brecht style MUSIK from poet Wolf Biermann - Now sitting in Cafe Zillemarkt off big [?] cafe avenue...looks like cobblestone floored Cafe Figaro - shooting mouth off about politics - probably wrong - Vodka with Bill + lisping thin boyish wrinkled Samuel Beckett - he sang Joyce lyrics he heard from Joyce's lips. See you the 15th. Allen."

To hear Ginsberg tell it in that one throwaway line, the meeting with Beckett was rich and enchanting. Imagine Beckett reciting Joyce, recalled from a meeting of the two modern giants of literature.  Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that room!

Burroughs' recollection of the get-together was somewhat at odds  with Allen Ginsberg's. It's as if Ginsberg and Burroughs were reporting from different planets.

As Burroughs remembered it:

"I recall a personal visit to Beckett. John Calder, my publisher and Beckett's, was the intermediary for a short, not more than a half and hour audience. This was in Berlin. Beckett was there directing one of his new plays. Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and myself were there for a reading. Also present in the visiting party were Fred Jordan [an editor at Grove Press] and Professor Hoellerer, a professor of English Literature at Berlin University.

"Beckett was polite and articulate. It was, however, apparent to me at least tat he had not the slightest interest in any of us, nor the slightest desire ever to see any of us again. We had been warned to take our own liquor as he would proffer none so we had brought along a bottle of whiskey. Beckett accepted a small drink which he sipped throughout the visit. Asking the various participants first what Beckett said, and what the whole conversation was about, seems to elicit quite different responses. Nobody seems to remember at all clearly. It was as if we had entered a hiatus of disinterest. I recall that we did talk of my son's recent liver transplant and the rejection syndrome. I reminded Beckett of our last meeting in Maurice Girodias' restaurant. On this occasion we had argued about the cut-ups, and I had no wish to renew the argument. So it was just, "yes," "Maurice's restaurant." Allen, I believe, asked Beckett if he had ever given a reading of his work. Beckett said "no."

"There was some small talk about the apartment placed at his disposal by the academy: a sparsely furnished duplex overlooking the Tiergarten. I said the zoo was very good, one of the best, with nocturnal creatures in dioramas, like their natural habitat...Beckett nodded, as if willing to take my word for this. I think there was some discussion of Susan Sontag's cancer. I looked at my watch. Someone asked Allen or Fred for the time. We got up to go. Beckett shook hands politely" (Beckett and Proust, in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays [1986], p. 182).

Susan Sontag had her own take on the meeting with Beckett. Interviewed with Burroughs by Victor Bockris for With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker (1982) she remembered:

Sontag: It all started like this: we were staying in this picturesque hotel in Berlin and Allen Ginsberg said, "We're going to see Beckett, c'mon,'"and I said, "Oh, William [Burroughs] are you are going, I don't want to butt in," and he said, "No, c'mon, c'mon," and we went. We knocked on the door of this beautiful atelier with great double height ceilings, very white. This beautiful, very thin man who tilts forward when he stands answered the door. He was alone. Everything was very clean and bare and white. I actually had seen him the day before on the grounds of the theater of the Akademie Der Kunst. Beckett comes to Berlin because he knows his privacy will be respected. He received us in a very courtly way and we sat at a very big long table. He waited for us to talk. Allen was, as usual, very forthcoming and did a great deal of talking. He did manage to draw Beckett out asking him about Joyce. That was somehow deeply embarrassing to me. Then we talked about singing, and Beckett and Allen began to sing while I was getting more and more embarrassed.

Victor Bockris: Bill [William Burroughs] says Beckett made you feel as if you would be welcome to leave as soon as you could.

Sontag: He didn't actually throw us out.

William Burroughs: Oh, the hell he didn't! See, I have an entirely different slant on the whole thing. In the first place, John Calder said, "Bring along some liquor," which we did. I know that Beckett considers other people different from him and he doesn't really like to see them. He's got nothing particular against the being there, it's just that there are limits to how long he can stand being with people. So I figured that about twenty minutes would be enough. Someone brought up the fact that my son was due for transplants, and Beckett talked about the problem of rejection, about which he'd read an article. I don't remember this singing episode at all. You see Susan says it seemed long, it seemed to me extremely short. Soon after we got there, and the talk about transplant, everybody looked at their watch, and it was very obviously time to go. We'd only brought along a pint and it had disappeared by that time.

Sontag: Allen said, "What was it like to be with Joyce? I understand Joyce had a beautiful voice, and that he liked to sing." Allen did some kind of "OM" and Beckett said, "Yes, indeed he had a beautiful voice," and I kept thinking what a beautiful voice he had. I had seen Beckett before in a café in Paris, but I had never heard him speak and I was struck by the Irish accent. After more than half a century in France he has a very pure speech which is unmarked by living abroad. I know hardly anybody who's younger than Beckett, who has spent a great deal of time abroad who hasn't in some way adjusted his or her speech to living abroad. There's always a kind of deliberateness or an accommodation to the fact that even when you speak your own language you're speaking to people whose first language it's not and Beckett didn't seem in any way like someone who has lived most of his life in a country that was not the country of his original speech. He has a beautiful Irish musical voice. I don't remember that he made us feel we had to go, but I think we all felt we couldn't stay very long.

Bockris: Did you feel the psychic push? That Beckett had "placed" you outside the room?

Burroughs: Everybody knew that they weren't supposed to stay very long. I think it was ten minutes after six that we got out of there. [...] He gave me one of the greatest compliment that I ever heard. Someone asked him, "What do you think of Burroughs?" and he said - grudgingly - "Well, he's a writer."

Sontag: High praise indeed.

Burroughs: I esteemed it very highly. Someone who really knows about writing, or say about medicine says, "Well, he's a doctor. He gets in the operating room and he knows what he's doing."

Sontag: But at the same time you thought he was hostile to some of your procedures?

Burroughs: Yes, he was, and we talked about that very briefly when we first came in during the Berlin visit. He remembered perfectly the occasion.

Sontag: Do you think he reads much?

Burroughs: I would doubt it. Beckett is someone who needs no input as such. To me it's a very relaxed feeling to be around someone who doesn't need me for anything and wouldn't care if  died right there the next minute. Most people have to get themselves needed or noticed. I don't have that feeling at all. But there's no point in being there, because he had no desire or need to see people.

Bockris: How did you feel when you left that meeting?

Sontag: I was very glad I had seen him. I was more interested just to see what he looks like, if he was as good-looking as he is in photos.

Burroughs: He looked very well and in very good shape. Beckett is about seventy-five. He's very thin and his face looks quite youthful. It's really almost an Irish streetboy face. We got up and left, the visit had been, as I say, very cordial, decorous...

Sontag: More decorous than cordial I would say. It was a weightless experience, because it's true, nothing happened.

Burroughs: Nothing happened at all.

Rarely has nothing been so fascinating and earned its much ado.

This little gem of a postcard is being offered by Brian Cassidy, Bookseller.

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Postcard image courtesy of Brian Cassidy, Bookseller, with our thanks.
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Superstar 1st Edition of Ulysses Estimated $450,000-$500,000 at Sotheby's

by Stephen J. Gertz

No. 24 of 100 signed and numbered copies on Dutch hand-made paper.
Estimate: $450,000-$500,000.

A jaw-dropping and superb Publisher's Presentation Copy of the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), number 24 of 100 signed and numbered  copies by the author printed on Dutch hand-made paper, is the superstar at Sotheby's-New York Library of an English Bibliophile Sale Part II, October 20, 2011. A volume from rare book heaven and one of a handful of incredible copies of Joyce first editions in  this auction, it is estimated to sell for $450,000-$500,000.

 

Tipped-in to this copy is a note-card from Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), key patron, champion, publisher of Joyce, and proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, her famed Paris book shop. The presentation is to St. Louis millionaire and art and book collector, Tudor Wilkinson, who, in 1923, married  Kathleen Marie Rose aka Dolores Rose, the most famous of all Ziegfeld Girls, and settled in Paris.

James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, in her Paris office, 1921.

This gift to Tudor Wilkinson was in gratitude for his efforts to gain her release from  the Nazis. In the late winter of 1941 Beach closed Shakespeare and Company after two threatening visits from German occupation authorities. In August 1942 she was arrested and remained interned until February 1943, the date of her note with this copy to Wilkinson, her release largely the result of Wilkinson's letter on her behalf to Jacques Benoist-Mechin, an ardent fan of Joyce who had been a member of Beach's lending library (joining in 1919) but who, at this point, was a secretary at Vichy headquarters.

As if the Beach presentation note wasn't not enough,  a page from the original typescript with corrections, annotations and revisions in Joyce's hand is also tipped-in to this copy.  The typescript leaf is page three from "The Wandering Rocks" episode in the book,  which Beach inscribed, "Page of original manuscript of Ulysseys with manuscript / additions by the author." 

An original print of the black and white photograph above, inscribed by Beach "Shakespeare and Company in the rue Dupuytren 1921 with James Joyce..." is also included with this copy.

In 2002, the copy of Long Island, NY commercial real estate developer, book collector, and dog breeder Roger Rechler, inscribed by Joyce to Kenry Kaeser, sold at Christie's-NY for $410,000. The copy under notice, with its powerful association to, and presentation by, the book's famous publisher and a dark episode in her life, the accompanying note, and leaf of original typecript with Joyce's autograph annotations and her inscription should easily reap the low and will likely exceed the high estimate. Despite the recession, the big money for big, trophy first editions remains healthy.

Estimate: $150,000- $200,000.

Also offered at this auction is the fine H. Bradely Martin copy in the very rare dust jacket of the first published edition of Joyce's Dubliners (1914), one of only 746 bound copies. A review copy with printed slip requesting that no reviews appear before June 15, it is estimated to sell for $150,000-$200,000. This copy last sold at Sotheby's-NY on April 30, 1990 for $14,000. The inscribed Rechler Copy in dust jacket sold at Christie's-NY on October 11, 2002 for $230,000. The inscribed Kain Copy without dust jacket sold at Sotheby's in 2006 for $137,200.

This collection of short stories was originally planned for publication in 1906. But the printers objected to certain passages and refused to print it for the publisher, Grant Richards, who abandoned the book. In 1910, publisher Maunsel printed an edition of 1000 copies. After Joyce refused to make emendations to the text the entire edition was destroyed. Joyce then added two important stories, "A Little Cloud," and "The Dead," to the collection, and in June 1914 Richards - this time using different, less opinionated printers - published the book.

Estimate: $40,000-$50,000.

The final big Joyce book in The Library of an English Bibliophile Sale Part II is a fine copy in the rare dust jacket of the first edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's great autobiographical novel published in New York, on December 29, 1916. The first British  edition appeared a month and a half later, on February 12, 1917, using the American sheets because the English printers refused to accept the responsibility for printing it.

Rejoice in Joyce.

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JOYCE, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922. First edition, No. 24 of 100 copies signed and numbered by the author, on Dutch hand-made paper, of a total edition of 1000 copies including 150 numbered-only copies on vergé d'arches paper and 750 numbered-only copies on plain paper. Quarto. Printed wrappers. This copy unopened. 

The story of Wilkinson and Beach can be found in a series of unpublished letters by Wilkinson to the poet and bookseller Adrienne Monnier held at the Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

Slocum and Calhoon A17. Connolly, The Modern Movement 42.

JOYCE, James. Dubliners. London: Grant Richards Ltd., [1914]. First edition., one of only 746  bound copies. Octavo. Publisher's maroon cloth. Dust jacket. Bookplate of H. Bradley Martin.

Slocum and Calhoon A8.

JOYCE, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1916. First edition, preceding the first U.K. edition. Octavo. Publisher's cloth. Dust jacket.

Slocum and Calhoon A11. Connolly, The Modern Movement 26.

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All images courtesy of Sotheby's, with our thanks.

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Booktryst has recently covered other great offerings at Sotheby's upcoming Library of an English Bibliophile Sale Part II, which we encourage you to read:

• The $175,000 Dust Jacket Comes to Auction.

• Scarce Poe First Editions Exhumed From Premature Burial at Sotheby's Sale.

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The Apocryphal Cookbooks of Famous Novelists

LAWRENCE, Cynthia [pseud. of Lillian Hellman?]. Barbie's Easy-As-Pie Cookbook.
New York: Random House, 1964.
Though she preferred anonymity, we're pleased that the Unfinished Woman
had time to finish this book, attributed to her based upon its Stalinist sympathies.

Recently, Kelvin Johnson, an adult-bookstore clerk in Baltimore, MD, bought the contents of a self-storage unit at auction. Within was box of books that upon close examination inspired Johnson to contact lawyers, accountants, and rare book dealers.

“I’m not much of a vanilla-book person,” Johnson said, “but I do know that none of these authors were known for their work in the kitchen. They’re all cookbooks.”

The news has rocked the literary establishment.

“We all feel like we’ve been kneaded, and flattened with a rolling pin,” Marilyn Bagley, Professor of English Literature at West Covina Community College in Southern California and author of Heavy Metal and Hip-Hop Motifs in Victorian Novels 1840-1860: The Foreshadow of Ozzie Osborne, Original 50 Cent, and the Quest For Bling Within the Works of William Thackeray and George Eliot, reported. “All our bubbles have been squooshed.”

Basil Pine-Coffin, a literary forensics specialist and rare book dealer that Johnson has hired to appraise the books, said, “stylistically, they’re spot on; there’s no question in my mind that they are genuine. They appear to be vanity editions, and one-offs – unique. They have certainly never been heard of or seen before. This is an amazing discovery that will provide scholars with plenty to chew on for many years to come. The books are priceless - but we’re working on it.”

A few highlights from the trove:

Mark Twain married his interest in gastronomy with his affection for the vernacular and erotic, and thus brought A Tramp, A Broad, and Huckleberry Pie out of the oven and onto the dessert tray.

Who knew that Charles Dickens was a closet chocolatier? Barnaby Fudge melts in your mouth.

Was Edgar Allen Poe a secret Jew? No one has ever imagined it. But The Tell-Tale Calves Liver, a tract on trayfe (non-kosher), strongly suggests that the idea ain’t just chopped liver.

William Styron suffered from depression for much of his adult life yet he, apparently, found joy in the simple pleasures and so bequeathed Sophie’s Choice Brisket to us.

Portrait of a Lady Finger is surely Henry James’ lightest confection.

We now know what drove F. Scott Fitzgerald to drink. The Beautiful and the Damned Angel Cake is a bittersweet tragedy.

True, she didn’t write fiction. Yet environmentalists and litterateurs will be seared when they learn that when not spraying the truth on pesticides Rachel Carson tacitly wrote The Silent Spring Chicken. No comment on this understated gustatory salute to Cornish game hens and the many ways to prepare them, sotto voce, and hormone-free.

It is likely that no one will ever tackle James Joyce’s contribution to the dinner table. No kitchen consultants have been able to make head or tail out of Finnegan’s Cake, much less bake it. But that shouldn’t stop it from winning the Pillsbury Bake-Off; it’s a modern classic that will be much admired though rarely eaten.

William Faulkner, it turns out, spent as much time with a baking sheet as a sheet of paper. One afternoon, he asked his Hollywood employer, studio-chief Jack Warner, if he could finish writing at home. Warner looked at his watch and said, sure, go ahead. A week later, Warner was pissed-off. “Where the fuck is Faulkner?” Turns out, Faulkner had something in the oven – at home in Oxford, Mississippi, where he apparently fled to compose the following soufflés: The Sound and the Fricassee; As I Lay Frying; Intruder in the Crust; Requiem For a Bun; and Albacore, Albacore!

Johnson is very excited. And the stakes are high. At a press conference this morning his team announced their appraisal of the collection, a staggering $200,000,000.

Yet all is not well in the world of literary dishes - instant riches.

James Salt, the respected rare book dealer that Johnson originally brought in to help with the project, excused himself early on. He believes the collection may only be worth $200, at best.

“I smell fish,” Salt sniffed, “and I’m not talking about Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea Bass: 20 Lite N’ Easy Meals.

“While it’s true that Tolstoy hated Italian food I seriously doubt that he would devote his time and labor to a 1,000 page book about his struggle with it. I don’t care how many so-called experts assert otherwise, I will never be convinced that he wrote War On Pizza.”

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