The James Joyce Italian Foundation wishes to express its solidarity towards its esteemed board member, Fritz Senn, and towards the Zürich James Joyce Foundation and to unanimously condemn the recent publication of Cats of Copenhagen by ITHYS PRESS.
This publication amounts to a blatant piracy of an unpublished Joyce story, written in 1936 for his grandson, Stephen Joyce, and contained in a letter held at the Zürich Joyce Foundation. Lest there should be any doubt, Anastasia (Stacey) Herbert presumably transcribed the letter when a guest at the Foundation and then published it without seeking any permissions.
Quite apart from the complex legal questions involved, she has infringed the obligations of common courtesy and betrayed the trust of those who allowed her – like many others – access to this precious and heretofore unseen material. In doing so she has violated the Zürich James Joyce Foundation\’s much appreciated policy of openness and trust. While as Joyce scholars, critics and readers we are anxious to see Joyce\’s unpublished materials being published we believe this must be done with the necessary respect for those archives that hold these materials and so we wish to distance ourselves from this publication and call for it to be withdrawn.
To publish sensitive and valuable manuscript material held in an archive without consultation with and agreement from that archive breaks the established rules of scholarship and this is particularly so in this case in which the principal objective of the publication is evidently a purely commercial one.
Rome, 17 February 2012 The members of The James Joyce Italian Foundation