Laura Barnes's business savvy makes her a rarity in the arts world. On the eve of Bloomsday, the James Joyce Centre's new director talks to Christine Madden

Like her idol, James Joyce, Laura Barnes keeps travelling east to follow her vocation. Having left her home in Ohio to study in New York, she wandered even further, answering a call to become the director of ReJoyce for the writer's centenary, and now to take on the directorship of the newly reopened James Joyce Centre in Dublin's North Great George's Street.

Since crossing the Atlantic to work on ReJoyce, Barnes has become a fixture in Irish cultural planning. A dealer in rare books with a specialisation in the modernist period, she was asked once again to work on the recent Beckett centenary as festival coordinator. When she took on that responsibility, she had already begun her new position at the James Joyce Centre (in March) and has since then been commuting between her current home in London and her future home in Dublin to fulfil her obligations as both an arts manager and a mum.

"I love what I do," she enthuses. "That adage about if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person, that's me . . . I'm very proud of what I and my colleagues at the centre have been able to pull off in a very short amount of time."

Barnes's own odyssey began when she was a young woman in the throes of teenage rebellion.

"When it was time to go to university, my parents told me the only school in the nation I was forbidden to go to was Columbia, because it was in New York City," she says. "And that was the only school I applied to."

She studied English literature, with minors in economics and the classics, which, she explains, drew her to Joyce and subsequently to the modernists.

After her undergraduate studies, Barnes went straight into book publishing and then took a master's in that field at New York University, followed by an MBA from Harvard. Her particular blend of talents as a literature scholar and entrepreneur contributes greatly to her success as both a book dealer and an arts manager, with interesting side- effects. While doing more research, she was intrigued by the story that Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Joyce's Ulysses, had been bankrupted by her efforts to popularise and sell the book.

"I went into her archives at Princeton and went through all her chequebooks and bank records," she says. She made an interesting discovery. "She [Sylvia Beach] was buying stock for her English-language bookshop in dollars and sterling, and selling Ulysses in francs. The franc plummeted against the dollar and sterling. She got absolutely hammered by currency fluctuations."

Something similar would be unlikely to happen to Barnes, who asserts that ReJoyce "came in slightly under budget in 2004" and that the Beckett centenary "came in on budget". Her experience with "spreadsheets and budgets and forecasting and all that kind of stuff" makes her that unlikely creature, a savvy business person in the arts.

She also knows how to deal with sticky legal situations, a definite plus for anyone having to work with the Joyce estate.

"As long as I have known Stephen , the estate has been a challenge to work with. But I've also found that - certainly in 2004 - if you abide by the very strict copyright guidelines, basically taking a very conservative position, you'll be fine. I used to laugh that my great victory in 2004 was that we weren't sued."

Yet she doesn't begrudge Stephen Joyce his power, nor his watchfulness over all things Joycean. "It is his right," she acknowledges.

Her business skill and acumen have, however, recently brought unwelcome attention to her book-dealing ventures, with the National Library of Ireland's purchase of a six-sheet collection of Joyce manuscripts that throws new light on the development of his monumental novel, Finnegans Wake. The library acquired the documents by private treaty through English auction house Sotheby's for €1.17 million, its third major acquisition of Joyce manuscripts since 2000. But because of its "insistence" on transparency, as "part of its acquisitions policy", says Barnes, the seller of the manuscripts was revealed to be one Laura Rosenfeld (Barnes by the name she was born with).

The sale, she believes, is "one of those things that, if you connect the dots in an inappropriate way, you come out with an inappropriate picture. I went back to book-dealing - that is my normal job, my career, or was. I was in London, and got a call from another English bookseller whose specialty is not modernism, who said: 'I'm calling to let you know there is this material, you should go look at it.' I got on the first train."

Barnes was keen to allow the manuscript to go back to Joyce's abandoned homeland, "and the decision I made was that the institution I wanted to approach first was the National Library of Ireland, because I thought it belonged there. I was very well aware that I couldn't approach them directly - they knew me, I knew them. That would have been inappropriate, which is why I went through Sotheby's."

The director of the National Library of Ireland (NLI), Aongus Ó hAonghusa, believed it had "got a good deal" when he discussed it with The Irish Times a few months ago. He explained that the purchase through Sotheby's meant that the library had warranties about the ownership and provenance of the manuscript. He also told the London Times in May that the library had a good relationship with Sotheby's through another recent purchase: "They know what we want in terms of ownership and provenance. It provides a level of reassurance that a small Parisian book-dealer could never do."

At present, the library has no further comment to make about the transaction, according to a spokesperson.

The confusion about the name on the purchase treaty unfortunately created additional distrust in the media.

"I used [the name] Laura Rosenfeld because it was a legally binding contract," she says. "In the States, my birth certificate, my taxes, my houses, all of my legal things, are in my birth name, because they attach to your social security number.

"Except for my taxes and legal documents, I'm Laura Barnes. I never in a million years thought somebody's going to go fishing in that respect. I wasn't trying to hide anything.

"The irony is that I went to great pains to offer [the manuscripts] to the National Library, to mitigate the conflict of interest. I was so conscious of keeping it clean so that there wouldn't be the potential conflict."

Although she will continue to collect and work on a consultation basis, Barnes will mostly put her book-dealing activity on ice in order to take on her new position as director of the James Joyce Centre.

"It's a full-time job," she says. "Our mission statement revolves around the Joyce Centre making a contribution to Joyce studies both on a scholarly and a public level - and I don't see them as mutually exclusive."

To cater for as well as attract a broad spectrum of visitors, she plans to host exhibitions that will appeal to the general public, "and one of the things I'm very proud of is that we are opening a cafe at the centre, Cafe Ulysses". Opening next Tuesday, it will "enables us to do things like lunch-and-a-lecture and lunchtime concerts. And it makes it possible for groups to come and build a morning or afternoon around being with us".

But "at the academic end of the spectrum", she adds, she would like "to create synergies and partnerships with UCD, the NLI, Trinity and relevant institutions internationally to see what we can contribute to the mix in terms of support".

"For example, the Joyce Centre has an apartment on the top floor that will be vacant. We would be more than pleased to join with an institution to provide the housing for a visiting scholar in exchange for their doing their work, doing their research, giving some lectures for us."

What does Barnes think Joyce would have made of all the fuss about him and his work? She smirks.

"Well, this is the same man that put so many puzzles in Ulysses to ensure his immortality," she says.

Nevertheless, she is adamant that "the centre will absolutely not go down the path" of the commercialisation of Joyce. "We are about promoting Joyce and his works, and bringing them to the community, not about dumbing them down."

Barnes feels it was "a blessing" to have become involved with Joycean activities in Dublin in the first place.

"There are very few people in life who have the great pleasure of being able to have their job be their passion," she says. "I'm very well aware how fortunate I am that I can work in a field I absolutely adore."

• The James Joyce Centre's planned programme of Bloomsday events tomorrow has been cancelled as a mark of respect on the day of Charles Haughey's State funeral