Evi Heinz, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
One of the treasures of the Bodleian’s John Ryder collection is a copy of the first British edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in a private limited edition by John Rodker for the Egoist Press in October 1922. An intriguing detail in this volume throws new light on the relationship between the Irish writer’s infamous modernist novel and the contemporary trade in polite erotica.
The Egoist Press’s British edition of Ulysses was printed from the same plates as Sylvia Beach’s earlier Paris edition – a text famously riddled with misprints – and was issued with an eight-page errata sheet. In Ryder 2, this sheet has been bound into the volume and in one place shows a watermark spelling the name ‘Casanova’.
This curious watermark has been identified by bibliographical scholar Gerald W. Cloud as belonging to a London-based private press called the ‘Casanova Society’. This publishing venture, also managed by Rodker, issued luxurious limited editions of erotic classics, from the Memoirs of Casanova to the Arabian Nights.
The use of the ‘Casanova’ paper for the Ulysses errata sheets is likely incidental – Rodker, who was engaged in both publishing projects at the same time, may have simply needed some spare paper at short notice and used what he had to hand. Nevertheless, this unexpected material encounter between two very different cultural signifiers is worth exploring further: What can the publications of the Casanova Society tell us about how Joyce’s book fits into the early twentieth-century limited editions market? And how does Ulysses feature in the literary imagination of contemporary readers of polite erotica?
Among the Casanova Society titles deposited in the Bodleian collections is a copy of the luxuriously produced 12-volume Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova di Seingalt, printed privately for subscribers between 1922 and 1923. With its gilt edges, quarter-calf binding and fine printing on hand-made paper, this publication tells us something about the level of material excellence that was expected by early twentieth-century collectors.
It also allows us to put into perspective the claims that are sometimes made for the early limited editions of Ulysses as ‘deluxe’ publications. In fact, their less than perfect printing and fragile softcover binding are a far cry from contemporary bibliophile’s editions, such as those issued by the Casanova Society. Ryder 2 is an interesting example of this fragility: the copy appears to have been rebound in leather by a previous owner but is now missing its cover and is held together by a make-shift book sleeve.
On a literary level, too, the Casanova Society offers an interesting perspective on Joyce’s novel: Francis MacNamara’s preface to Balzac’s The Physiology of Marriage, printed privately by the Casanova Society in 1925, makes direct mention of Ulysses as a modern successor to the French love literature of the early nineteenth century. Noting that ‘in Joyce’s Ulysses we have the very love that is demanded of a husband, the love of things in all their distasteful reality’ (p. vii), MacNamara presents the Irish writer’s book as a work in the tradition of Stendhal and Balzac, offering an intriguing way of approaching its much discussed ‘obscenity’.
Indeed, it is in this context that the linkage between Ulysses and the Casanova Society offers the most food for thought: both are phenomena of the 1920s that can tell us something about how the book culture of the period negotiated the borders between good taste and bad, literature and obscenity. And the watermark on the Ryder 2 errata sheets – where Ulysses meets Casanova – is a potent symbol of this intriguing cultural conjunction.
Evi Heinz was Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries during October and November 2023
