Manhattan Rare Book Company

“Personally I will be very gratified if your enterprise is successful as it will permit American readers who have always proved very kind to me to obtain the authenticated text of my book without running the risk of helping some unscrupulous person in his purpose of making profit for himself alone out of the work of another to which he can advance no claim of moral ownership.”
– James Joyce, in a letter to Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION (UNAUTHORISED PRINTING) OF JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES. IN OUTSTANDING CONDITION.

“By anyone’s estimate,” writes Kevin Birmingham, “Samuel Roth was the biggest literary pirate of the 1920s” (p. 274). Birmingham’s study, The Most Dangerous Book, lays bare the mammoth effort to get Ulysses published in the United States during an era of heavy censorship laws and wide-reaching prohibition. Naturally, Samuel Roth, the “biggest literary pirate of the 1920s” with a penchant for salacious works, features significantly in the work, impacting the early history of Ulysses reception in the English-speaking world. Present here are the complete volumes of Roth’s pirated editions of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake (then known as “A New Unnamed Work” and elsewhere “Work in Progress”), serialised in his publications Two Worlds Monthly and Two Worlds Quarterly respectively.

Both magazines served as vehicles for Roth’s double-sided love for the giants of literary modernism. On one side was his craving for association with the names of Joyce, Pound and Lawrence, among others. But it is this craving that led him to steal, expurgate and bowdlerise the works he admired most—a craving that ultimately landed him on the wrong side of the law, impecunious and behind bars. His dreams of building “the most powerful magazine group in America” (as he pitched to investors) evaporated almost as soon as they began, but not before producing some of the earliest US publications of Joyce’s works before the first authorised American editions of Ulysses (1934) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939).
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Ulysses began its public life in the New York magazine The Little Review, with about half of the novel appearing in a series of instalments from 1918 to 1920. And indeed the Review came under fire for the obscenities contained therein, embroiling its editors and financier in some of the first legal battles over Joyce’s works, resulting in Ulysses being banned in the US in 1920 for over a decade. The complete Ulysses would not be published until 1922, the result Sylvia Beach’s now-famed Shakespeare and Co. edition published and printed in Paris. As Birmingham notes, the “disputes over the astonishing content of Joyce’s writing began years before Ulysses was published” (Birmingham, p. 7). But in the US, they continued for years after.

Before any publisher in America would dare to acquire such a risky and risqué work as Ulysses, there was Samuel Roth. A man who “admired Joyce’s novel so much he decided to steal it”, Roth made his career excising modernist writings from European magazines where they had been authorised to be printed, but particularly by circulating material deemed at the time to be vulgar, indecent and prohibited from trade within the US (Birmingham, p. 275). His biggest successes, then, came from his illicit reproductions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses.

Roth’s piracy was not strictly illegal—if a work written in English was not printed in the US on plates made in the US, it held no protection under American copyright laws. Thus, under the guise of Two Worlds Quarterly and Two Worlds Monthly, Roth printed passages of Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake in instalments between 1925 and 1927. Roth’s legal transgression rather lied in the obscenity of the works he circulated, or at least the obscenity as shrewdly perceived by contemporary morality laws which he attempted to circumvent by blue-pencilling some of Joyce’s diction. Lobbied for by Anthony Comstock—founder New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the same organisation that instigated Ulysses’ initial prohibition in the US following its appearance in The Little Review—the 1873 Comstock Act (or, the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use) criminalised any use of the US Postal Service to transmit any “instrument or article for self-pollution” including any “book, pamphlet, circular paper, drawing, print, picture, advertisement” that references such insalubrious behaviour (Ruppenthal, p. 53). It is under these premises that Roth would face prosecution, but not before he began his limited American run of Ulysses in April 1926.

Contemporary authors were sensitive to this legal grey zone that allowed their works to be sold without their permission and without compensation. Realising the futility of legal action against Roth, Ezra Pound—whose material Roth was also printing without permission—suggested to Joyce that he either publicly denounce Roth or “organize a gang of gunmen to scare Roth out of his pants. I don’t imagine anything but physical terror works in a case of this sort (with a strong pull of avarice, bidding him to be BOLD)” (Pound, p. 255). It was Sylvia Beach who, seeing the need for creativity, devised a plan to ostracise Roth from the literary world. She drafted a protest against Roth and asked for a wide array of authors to sign it in support of anti-piracy. One-hundred and sixty authors assented to Beach’s proposal, including Woolf, Forster, Hemingway, Yeats, Shaw and even Albert Einstein. Nine-hundred publishers in the US alone were sent the protest by Beach from February 1927, and Roth was soon outcast as a literary pariah.

While the above commentary on Roth’s involvement in Ulysses' reception in the US is documented widely not least by Birmingham, Roth did in fact issue a response to the protest as preserved in the present rare copies of his serialised Ulysses. The volume for June 1927 includes the following “Offer to James Joyce”: “If Mr. Joyce is really in need of money, it is here in New York waiting for him, provided he is willing to make one public appearance to answer my charges against him for his conduct in the matter of my publication of his ULYSSES in Two WORLDS MONTHLY.” Roth continues, “If Mr. Joyce was not really responsible, as has been suggested possible, for the actions of Sylvia Beach and his other friends, particularly in the publication of the spurious much-signed protest, he owes me and the world this explanation”, before concluding, “it would be a pity if his managers let him go hungry.” Roth’s appeal was unsuccessful, and the combined shame and prosecution landed him far from his vision of a global publishing empire.

Ulysses would not be seen on the shelves of American booksellers until 1934, being published by Random House after the two-year-long legal dispute United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—incited when the publishing company had one copy imported from France deliberately to be seized by the government upon arrival. Publishers, having seen how many great minds of the day were defending the novel (while taking into account its popularity in Two Worlds Monthly), had solicited Joyce for publication of Ulysses in America. After a prolonged battle with Sylvia Beach, who at the time had held the rights to publication, Joyce had made a deal with Random House. Its appearance in America then sparked the famous court case, resulting in Judge John M. Woolsey decision that “whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States” (Essential Documents of American History, p. 183). The legal dispute over its publication combined with Roth's wilful disregard of the law makes Roth’s Ulysses—illicit, bowdlerised and pirated as it was—the first US edition of Joyce’s masterpiece.
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JOYCE, JAMES. Ulysses. IN: Two Worlds Monthly, ed. by Samuel Roth. New York: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1926–27. First American edition, pirated. Octavo, 11 volumes (July 1926–September 1927). Original wrappers.

FINE COPIES: Every other set we've seen has had significant wear (due to the fragile nature of the publication). This copy is in a remarkable set of preservation with only the most trivial wear. It would be difficult to image a finer set.

References:

Birmingham, Kevin, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Penguin Press, 2014)

Ellman, Richard, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)

Essential Documents of American History, ed. by Bob Blaisdell, 2 vols. (Mineola: Dover, 2016), II: From Reconstruction to the Twenty-First Century

Pound, Ezra, and James Joyce, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. by Forrest Read (London: Faber, 1968)

Ruppenthal, J.C., “Criminal Statutes on Birth Control”, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 10.1 (1919), pp. 48–61

Slocum, John J. and Herber Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, 1882–1941 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971).

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