A dispute over permissions fees between the estate of the legendary Irish writer James Joyce, author of Ulysses, and an Irish university press wishing to use an excerpt of Joyce's writing in an anthology, has resulted in the publisher being forced under legal mandate to remove unauthorized Joyce passages from thousands of copies of the finished book.
Sarah Wilbourne, publisher of Cork University Press, told PW that while the anthology Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, edited by David Pierce, is available in the U.S. and the Irish Republic, the Joyce estate has so far prevented the distribution of the weighty tome in the United Kingdom. The resulting story of the book is very complicated, involving the intricacies of copyright law, the moral right of access to internationally great literature and the tight control of Joyce's work by his estate, specifically by his grandson Stephen Joyce.
In the final stages of settling permissions fees for the book, it became obvious that there would be problems dealing with the Joyce estate. Stephen Joyce often becomes personally involved with individual permissions to use his grandfather's work.
Pierce initially asked to use extracts from Joyce's great novels, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and to reprint in full the short story "The Dead." The Joyce estate demanded a fee of £7,000 ($11,000), which represented half the permissions budget for the entire project. This was not feasible and at odds with the standard fees negotiated from other literary estates.
Reluctant to publish an Irish anthology without Joyce, Cork made a new offer of £2,500 ($4,000) plus 0.5% of royalties; the Joyce estate again declined. So Pierce and the publisher decided to use excerpts from a Ulysses edition published by Picador in England in 1997 during a brief period when the copyright on Joyce's work appeared to have expired.
Thinking they were in the clear using the Picador Ulysses, CUP printed 10,000 copies of Irish Writing in September 2000. The Joyce estate immediately took legal action and, backed by the courts, demanded the book be pulped. A compromise was reached; the book was returned to the bindery and four CUP staffers removed the offending pages and replaced them with mostly blank pages citing "a dispute in relation to copyright."
The book has been for sale in the U.S. and the Irish Republic since March of this year. The U.S. distributor, Stylus Publishing (www.styluspub.com), has reported very brisk sales in the U.S. for the $39 book.
Stephen Joyce is also taking legal action against Macmillan/ Picador over its 1997 edition of Ulysses. A ruling in the case is due in November 2001.
