Without Copyrights by Spoo Robert

Author:Spoo, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.2 Cover of the first number of Two Worlds Monthly, July 1926.

The broad ribaldry of Roth’s quarterly magazine was toned down in Two Worlds Monthly to a pervasive risqué note and a quietly dogmatic insistence on sexual freedom. But there was much that was not new or au courant. Roth drew a great deal of his material from back issues of magazines and dated collections of international fiction. In many ways, Two Worlds Monthly resembled such turn of the century American periodicals as Transatlantic Tales or Tales of Town Topics, which had offered, in the words of one 1896 advertisement, a “complete novel, by some well-known author, selections of short stories, burlesques, poems, witticisms, etc., from [previous issues] so far back as to make the republication fresh reading.”111 Roth filled his monthly with such content, adding a veneer of modernism and a parade of glittering names to give color to his boast of purveying new and daring experiments.

Roth’s chief source was the American public domain. In addition to quarrying works that had lost their copyrights through noncompliance with notice and renewal requirements, he took his materials gratis from dozens of European sources that had not satisfied the ad interim and manufacturing formalities of the 1909 act: periodicals such as This Quarter (for works by Sandburg and Djuna Barnes), Poetry Review (Pound), The Criterion and The New Criterion (Eliot, Lawrence, Humbert Wolfe), The English Review (Francis Gribble), The Calendar of Modern Letters (T. F. Powys, Herbert L. Kahan), The Adelphi (M. L. Skinner, John W. Coulter, Mary Arden, William Gehardi), The London Mercury (Hermann Bahr), The Bystander (Leonard Merrick), The Illustrated London News (G. K. Chesterton), and The Dublin Magazine (George Manning-Sanders, Michael Scot); and such publishers as Hutchinson (J. A. Brendon), Unwin (Middleton), Oxford University Press (Jan Neruda), Eveleigh Nash (Merrick), the Golden Cockerel Press (A. E. Coppard, Martin Armstrong), Stephen Swift & Co. (Pound), Elkin Mathews (Pound), A. C. Fifield (W. H. Davies), Selwyn & Blount (Jules Lemaitre), C. W. Beaumont (Hugh de Selincourt, Philip Guedalla), Curwen Press (John Galsworthy), Cuala Press and Maunsel & Co. (Synge), Contact Editions and Three Mountains Press (Barnes, Norman Douglas), and, of course, Shakespeare and Company (Joyce).112 Two Worlds Monthly was largely a copyright-free omnibus, of which the only legally protected portions—apart from occasional original material and the editor’s own contributions—were the selection and arrangement of uncopyrighted pieces. Roth coolly inserted the blanket notice “Copyright … by Samuel Roth” in every number.

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