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Robert Spoo, “Ulysses in New York: Everything But 1922.”

Professor Robert Spoo received his MA and PhD in English from Princeton University and taught for more than ten years as a tenured faculty member in the English Department at The University of Tulsa, where he was also Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He has published numerous books and articles on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and other modern literary figures. His teaching interests include copyrights and intellectual property, forms of piracy and theories of the public domain, law and literature, and the copyright-related needs of scholars. Professor Spoo's book, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, July 2013), offers a legal and cultural history of the impact on non-US authors of the protectionist and isolationists features of US copyright laws from 1790 on. His book, Modernism and the Law (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), surveys the legal regimes—obscenity, copyright, defamation, privacy, and publicity—that shaped modernist literature, and was written with the support of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Professor Spoo is a copyright advisor to numerous academic journals and projects, and acts as general counsel for the International James Joyce Foundation.

Professor Spoo earned his JD from the Yale Law School, where he was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. As an attorney, Professor Spoo has represented authors, scholars, documentary filmmakers, record companies, and other creators and users of intellectual property. His litigation work has included serving as co-counsel, with the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and other attorneys, for Professor Carol Shloss of Stanford against the Estate of James Joyce.

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Kerri Maher, presenting her new novel, The Paris Bookseller

Acclaimed historical novelist Kerri Maher shines at bringing to life the true stories of influential women. In 2018, Maher published The Kennedy Debutante, an enthralling love story about Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s sister; The Girl in White Gloves, about the life of Grace Kelly, followed in 2019. Now, Maher’s The Paris Bookseller (Berkley Hardcover; on sale January 11, 2022), chronicles the story of Sylvia Beach, the American woman behind the much-loved Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and her courageous triumph over censorship while publishing James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses.

A former bookseller herself, Maher was first inspired by Beach’s story while working in the conservation department of Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, preserving rare texts. The Paris Bookseller is her love letter to bookstores, and to the woman who fought to print the book that became one of the 20th century’s most important pieces of literature.