Judge tells publisher not to correct Joyce's punctuation

A young fan of James Joyce once asked the Irish maestro, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" The novelist replied: "No, it did lots of other things too." One of those things was to tamper endlessly with the manuscripts of his 1922 masterpiece, which recounts over 900 pages a single Dublin day in the life of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.

Yesterday, Joyce the chronic fidgeter reached out from beyond the grave to hand a legal victory to his literary estate. In the High Court, Mr Justice Lloyd decided the 1997 "Reader's Edition" of Ulysses published by Picador, an imprint of Macmillan, breached the estate's copyright. It includes changes to the text of Ulysses – corrected spelling and simplified punctuation – that the Joyce trustees believe to be unauthorised.

Most of the case turns on about 250 words in the Picador edition, compiled by the American editor Danis Rose, which never appeared in print during Joyce's lifetime.

Picador won leave to appeal but, if the firm fails, 1,000 undistributed copies of the disputed version of the book will have to be recalled. The publisher also fell foul of the recent EU changes to copyright law, which extend control over literary works from 50 to 70 years after an author's death. Joyce died in 1941.

Mr Justice Lloyd made no order about costs. They will be high, for both sides.