Joyce, James

asking her to ask her husband, the poet and novelist James Stephens, about the availability of European publication rights to his 1928 novel Etched in Moonlight, since “An American friend of mine is bringing out a rival edition to Tauchnitz" that may offer better terms than Tauchnitz and Joyce himself has no book free, also enquiring whether Stephens objects to a photograph of "himself, Sullivan and me taken in the street in Paris" being reproduced in Gorman's forthcoming biography, 2 pages, 8vo, 2 Avenue Saint Philibert, Paris, 21 November 1931, housed in a collector's quarter-morocco slipcase

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 Joyce had become close to the Irish writer James Stephens in the later 1920s. He even suggested that Stephens should be responsible for completing Work in Progress if he became too blind to continue; a decision made at least in part because the two men shared the same date of birth (according to Joyce, if not to other sources) and their combined initials formed the common abbreviation in Ireland for Jameson's whiskey. In this letter Joyce is trying to steer Stephens towards the Albatross Press, which launched in January 1932. Albatross did not publish any of Stephens's work, but they brought out an edition of Dubliners in 1932. THIS LETTER IS APPARENTLY UNPUBLISHED (not in Ellmann's Letters).