James Joyce
James Joyce's accounts and jottings kept in a school notebook. Photographs: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
James Joyce, and images from his earliest writings, including notes on Dante, and his accounts and jottings kept in a school notebook. Photographs: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
Images from Joyce's earliest writings, including notes on Dante. Photographs: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
TERENCE KILLEEN
The National Library of Ireland has put its collection of James Joyce manuscripts online, free of charge. It’s an excellent resource, but appears daunting at first – so where should the reader start?TUESDAY APRIL 10TH, 2012, was a great day in the world of Joyce studies. On this day, the National Library of Ireland made its considerable holdings of James Joyce manuscripts available cost-free online. This was the first time that such an initiative had been undertaken by any institution, anywhere.
A very important part of Irish heritage is now easily accessible. There is no need for special visits to the library, and no need to obtain a reader’s ticket. Instead, the documents are there for all to see online.
It is hoped that people with no expertise in textual studies will be interested in using this new resource; after all, the Irish State paid some €12.6 million back in 2002, plus another €1 million or so for the “Circe” manuscript in 2000 (which can also now be found online, as is another small but very important collection of early Finnegans Wake manuscripts, for which the library paid €1.17 million in controversial circumstances in 2006).
There are two initial points to bear in mind: due to the rushed nature of the library’s action (in response to a pre-emptive strike by the Joyce scholar Danis Rose) the photographs of the manuscripts are in low-resolution PDF form. The quality, it must be said, is not great, so that Joyce’s hand, especially in the Ulysses manuscripts, is difficult to decipher (not to mention that, in the case of the notes, they are often crossed through in thick crayon).
The library has promised that the manuscripts will be available in “very high-resolution formats” from June 16th next, and has also declared that it is “developing new image-viewing software which will ensure that online images of the James Joyce manuscripts can be researched in minute detail by NLI website visitors”.
The other issue is that the manuscripts have been placed online in a very raw state, without any real context or annotation, let alone transcription. There is no reason why all this should not follow in due course.
Full story at Irish Times
Thanks to G MacDowell for briningthis story to my attention.
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