In my days as General Editor of the Loyola Classics series, my primary responsibilities were threefold: to recruit introducers, write the extended bio and questions at the end, and track down copyrights.

(Well, you should add #1 to that – read lots and lots of books)

The copyright-hunting was both fascinating and frustrating. I honestly didn’t mind it, though. It satisfied the my inner Harriet the Spy, still alive and well after thirty years or so, and it was an adventure of sorts.

But it was aggravating. Partly because it really is a puzzle –  the US Copyright office website is of limited value, and even the records they have there (my dad did some detective work for me there once) are usually incomplete and out of date. I would figure out that Jane Doe held the copyright to an author’s work, but I would have no earthly clue who Jane Doe was. Sometimes things fell together in with the greatest of ease – faced with a mysterious name associated with the copyright of a novel whose author had recently been the subject of a biography, I wrote to the scholar who’d written the biography, asked who Jane Doe was, and got an immediate reply, "Oh, that’s the author’s sister. Here’s her address and phone number."

Voila!

It was also frustrating  because copyright law is so amazingly complex, fluctuating, and when you throw foreign copyright law into the mix, you’ve got a lot for a non-lawyer to deal with and try to understand.

We had a couple of uncooperative heirs – one who changed her mind on a contract because  she objected to one little codicil that is absolutely standard in US rights contracts, and would not be moved. It broke my heart because it was a title that I really wanted to see back in print. Ah, well.

But that’s nothing compared to what Stephen James Joyce is up to! Joyce is the grandson and sole literary executor of, naturally, the James Joyce estate, and this New Yorker article details his efforts to close off scholars’ access and ability to use Joyce materials.

It seems that Joyce’s point of view is that scholarly efforts are personally invasive, exploitive and actually work to discourage "ordinary readers" (a company in which he would include himself) from reading his grandfather’s work, in giving off the impression that they are incomprehensibly dense and can only be read with help and interpretation. There’s a huge Crank Element at work here – Stephen Joyce does seem unreasonable in regard to some requests and is angry, volatile, and difficult. But other literary heirs seem to have been inspired by him, and the battle is fairly and entertainly presented in the New Yorker piece.