Miserable 'Dublineses'
- Dublin, Ireland 1904. The writer James Joyce (1882-1941) began writing a collection of stories later titled Dubliners (Dublineses). The book completed it in about three years, but it failed to publish it immediately. It is still in the hands of the master or the master.
In total, it sent the original to 15 editors. It is true that not all of them refused; in 1910 the editors Maunsel & Roberts printed a thousand copies, but due to the discrepancies about the text, the editors broke the agreement and burned all the copies. In addition, James Joyce had to face printing expenses, as he was able to at least store the original plates he had used in the printing press and get another editor to use them as well. However, this advantage was not enough and the author spent another four years, published by editors.
Finally, 10 years after the book was written, in June 1914, the publisher Grant Richards launched the collection of short stories. Four years earlier, the same house had shown interest in the author, but no agreement was reached with him. In 1914, Joyce was forced to give in under several conditions: for the first 500 copies sold, the author would not receive a penny and also had to purchase the 120 copies. But in the end, 1,250 copies of Dublineses were on the market.
However, the naturalist description of the Irish middle class did not immediately become classic. That same month, on 28 June, Francisco José I of Austria was murdered in Sarajevo and the outbreak of World War I, which did not help the sale. In the first year he sold 379 copies; we do not know if the 120 copies the author paid per contract are within that amount or if, added, they managed to sell a total of 499 units, but the truth is that they did not reach the 500 and, therefore, Joyce received nothing. And by then he had already paid 1,120 copies of his pocket.
The year 1915 was even worse: Only 33 copies were sold and 499 copies were lost forever. The SS Arabic boat departing from Ireland and heading to New York had almost 500 copies of the book, thinking it would be more successful across the ocean. The U-24, a German submarine, attacked the ship with torpedoes and sank it about 80 kilometres from the Irish coast. And all those books were forever in the background.
Today, thousands of copies of the classic Dublineses are sold in dozens of languages, and the few copies of that fatal first edition have come to cost 150,000 euros at auctions.
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