Gill and Macmillan's splendid new book, The Ireland Anthology, has one curious omission and the publishers aren't at all happy about it. The anthology, they say in a prefatory note, was to have contained three extracts from the work of James Joyce, but the James Joyce Estate refused permission. This is because the estate is in dispute with Picador over Danis Rose's recent edition of Ulysses. Picador is an imprint of Macmillan in London, but Gill & Macmillan is an independent associate company and had no part in the publication of Danis Rose's edition. "Literary estates," Gill & Macmillan argue, "have obligations as well as rights, not least a moral obligation to the wider literary community. It is difficult to discern what possible service is rendered by the refusal to permit quotation from the greatest of all Irish writers in an anthology such as this."
I agree wholeheartedly, but urge you to buy the anthology anyway. It was the brainchild of the late Sean Dunne, who chose the fascinating extracts from both well-known and obscure sources. George O'Brien's introduction and notes are first-class, and the book, selling at £19.99, will make an ideal Christmas present.
I hadn't realised that Cork University Press, which has just taken over the 20-year-old feminist-inspired Attic Press, is such a venerable institution - in fact, having been founded in 1925 by University College Cork, it's the oldest commercially active university imprint in the country.
The takeover is something Attic's co-founder and publisher, Roisin Conroy, declares herself happy with: "Women's studies and gender studies are now an integral part of university life. School texts and images of women have changed also.
"And as a natural response to the huge changes Ireland has experienced, I feel it is time for Attic Press to pass the pen to a new and younger generation of women at Cork University Press and elsewhere, who are emerging with fresh ideas and approaches."
For its part, Cork University Press, according to its publisher Sara Wilbourne, is confident that the acquisition of Attic and its 200 existing titles "will strengthen our plans to move into general publishing and will continue the thrust of Attic's programme of publishing in the areas of women's studies, politics, history and literature".
And she pays special tribute to Roisin, whose achievements in Irish publishing, she feels, "have been pivotal." Attic, she says, "created waves and precedents".
I just hope that CUP proves better at publicising its Attic titles than it manages to do with its own publications. A proof copy of poems by Sean O Tuama was sent by CUP to someone called John Bowland, who was assured that an invitation to the Dublin launch of the book would be forwarded in due course.
Well, John Boland (and perhaps John Bowland, too) was keen to attend and write about this launch, Sean O Tuama being a fine poet, superb scholar and lovely man, but the invitation never arrived to an event I believe occurred some weeks ago.
Nonetheless, and despite CUP, I salute Sean's volume, which is entitled Death In The Land Of Youth and has many fine poems both in their Irish originals and in translations by the author and Peter Denman, and features an excellent introduction by Robert Welch, who says of Sean that he "carries the authority of the man who has taken the trouble to know about death and celebrate life".
A couple of months back I wrote about a sale of books by Mealy's in Castlecomer, and next week in Dublin's Tara Towers Hotel the same auctioneer has an even bigger sale of "rare, valuable and interesting books, manuscripts and ephemera".,
Notable among the latter is the original Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, printed in Liberty Hall in the early hours of Easter Monday, 1916.
This original (which had a run of 2,500 copies) contains, according to Fonsie Mealy, "many typographical peculiarities which distinguished it from later editions", and he adds that its sale next week affords "a unique opportunity to acquire probably the greatest single printed item in modern Irish history, one of only very few which have survived, and possibly the last in private hands".
Oh, did I mention that the asking price is between £18,000 and £25,000? For somewhat less, you can acquire a 1792 three-volume first edition of The Works Of Edmund Burke (£180), a 1917 Sean O'Casey broadside on Thomas Ashe (up to £400), an almost complete set of the magazine Irish Writing (between £180 and £250), and five Seamus Heaney first editions, all signed by the author, for between £160 and £220.
These are but a few of the 1,500 books, periodicals and other items on sale in the Tara Towers next Wednesday and Thursday from 10.30 a.m. each day.
Long before our current President's stirring declaration of intent to build bridges throughout this green and pleasant land of ours, two groups of women - one from Bennetsbridge in Co Kilkenny and one from Derry - were doing just that.
In 1993, as part of a Co-Operation North exchange, the Bennetsbridge group of women writers travelled to Derry to meet their counterparts there, and in the ensuing years they've met many times, exchanging ideas and developing friendships.
The result is a book being launched in the Irish Writers' Centre at 2 p.m. today by Eithne Strong. Entitled Meet Me Halfway, it has a foreword by Eavan Boland.