A Protest

[MacLeish, Archibald and Ludwig Lewisohn]

Samuel Roth (1893-1974) was a poet, pirate publisher and bookseller during the 1920s. He worked three markets: modernist literature – Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Andre Gide, racy titles – School Life in Paris, Only a Boy, The Russian Princess, and any possible common ground between them – James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. He took advantage of the American law that “an English language book did not have American copyright protection unless it was printed on plates manufactured in the United States. All Roth needed to do was reprint British and European titles that hadn’t yet found American publishers.” Ulysses had been effectively banned in the United States from 1921 after the appearances of excerpts in The Little Review. Roth had read these excerpts, was one of the novel's pre-publication private subscribers, and “admired Joyce’s novel so much he decided to steal it.” He published bowdlerised episodes from Ulysses in Two Worlds Monthly from July 1926 until August 1927; Joyce engaged American lawyers to stop publication; decided to hurry the process along and, in collaboration with Sylvia Beach, produced the “International Protest”, a broadside with a text by Archibald MacLeish and Ludwig Lewisohn, revised by Joyce, listing 167 literary and cultural figures organised by Sylvia Beach in support of Joyce's position, and published in English and French editions in Paris on 2 February 1927, Joyce’s birthday. Those two broadsides are well documented and appear irregularly for sale. The origins and producers of this version are unclear: the title has changed, the layout is different to the English and French editions, the paper has a Warren's Olde Style watermark, an American paper stock, there is a copy in the University of Buffalo's James Joyce collection, though with no other background information about its production and that's it. We can't find mention of other copies of this American printing, either held in institutions or offered for sale.