I am posting what I believe to be a very rare item, which I have copied at the New York Public Library:
CONTEMPO Volume III, Number 13
James Joyce Issue (edited by Stuart Gilbert)
February 15, 1934
I was alerted to this issue in the following article: “ ‘Ulysses’ Arrives in the United States: A Perspective from Eighty Years Ago.” By Richard J. Gerber, James Joyce Quarterly, Fall 2013, pp. 163-167.
As Gerber explains, Bennett Cerf’s Random House published one hundred copies of Joyce’s Ulysses in January 1934 in order to secure its copyright in the United States. U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey had ruled that the book was not pornographic, enabling the book’s publication.
Contempo was a so called “little magazine” offering literary and social commentary. It was published only for three years, between 1931 and 1934. Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and Eugene O’Neill were among the authors featured. Ezra Pound served as the magazine’s foreign editor. In addition to the James Joyce issue, Contempo published special editions devoted to work and criticism by and about William Faulkner, Hart Crane, and George Bernard Shaw. The editors of Contempo asked Stuart Gilbert, one of the first Joyce scholars, to serve as guest-editor for their final, special edition devoted to Joyce.
CONTENTS:
James Joyce’s “Work in Progress [published as Finnegans Wake],” Part I
Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf’s “Publishing Ulysses”
commentary by Stuart Gilbert, one of the first Joyce scholars: “We’ll to the Woods No More”
Modern Library advertisement for its editions of Joyce’s Dubliners (1926) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1928)
Richard Thoma, “A Dream in Progress,” a discussion of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (a character in Finnegans Wake)
Samuel Beckett’s acrostic poem “Home Olga.” based on Joyce’s name and written in 1932
William van Wyck’s “To James Joyce, Master Builder,” a poem in tribute to Joyce
Eugene Jolas’s “Verbirrupta for James Joyce,” a parody of Finnegans Wake
a review by Padraic Colum of Charles Duff’s Joyce and the Plain Reader
Gotham Book Mart’s advertisement for the Egoist Press edition of Ulysses and other works. (A personal note: I used to patronize the Gotham Book Mart.)
Contempo advertisement for the Random House Ulysses
Gerber concludes:
… Contempo III.13 is an important document in the Joyce and Ulysses history, with Gilbert’s recollection of Joyce’s rediscovery and iconic use of the monologue intérieur technique representing the immediate past, Cerf’s account of publishing Ulysses embodying the remarkable present, and Joyce’s excerpt from Finnegans Wake presaging the imminent future. From start to finish, the brilliance of Contempo III.13 is that it captures, in part, a sampling of the critical atmosphere at the initial high point of modern literature–that moment when Ulysses first burst upon the American scene, like a comet, a shooting star streaking across the literary sky.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
January 2022