The publication history of Ulysses is complex. There have been at least 18 editions, and variations in different impressions of each edition.
According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over 2,000 errors.[195] As subsequent editions attempted to correct these mistakes, they would often add more, due in part to the difficulty of separating non-authorial errors from Joyce's deliberate "errors" devised to challenge the reader.[51]
Notable editions include:[a]
- Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922: The private,[196] first edition published in Paris on 2 February 1922 (Joyce's 40th birthday) by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company. Beach commissioned Darantiere in Dijon to print 1,000 numbered copies consisting of 100 signed copies on Dutch handmade paper (350 francs), 150 numbered copies on vergé d’Arches paper (250 francs), and 750 copies on handmade paper (150 francs),[196][197] plus an extra 20 unnumbered copies on mixed paper for libraries and press.[198][199][200]
- London: Egoist Press, 1922: The first English edition published by Harriet Shaw Weaver's Egoist Press in October 1922. For legal reasons the book was printed on behalf of Egoist Press by John Rodker using the same printer, Darantiere, and plates as the first edition. This edition consisted of 2,000 numbered copies on handmade paper for sale[201] plus 100 unnumbered copies for press, publicity and legal deposit libraries.[202][203][200][204] A seven-page errata list compiled by Joyce, Weaver and Rodker was loosely inserted and contained 201 corrections.[205][206] The U.S. Post Office reportedly burned up to 500 copies,[207] as noted in later Shakespeare and Company editions.[208]
- New York: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1929: The first U.S. edition of the novel was pirated by Samuel Roth without Joyce's authorisation, and first published serially in Roth's Two Worlds Monthly, then later in a single volume in 1929. It was designed to closely mimic the 1927 Shakespeare and Company 9th printing but many errors and corruptions occurred during reproduction.[209][210] Reportedly 2,000–3,000 copies were printed but the majority were seized and destroyed by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice after a raid on Roth's offices on 4 October 1929[211]
- Hamburg: Odyssey Press, 1932: In two volumes. The title page of this edition states "The present edition may be regarded as the definitive standard edition, as it has been specially revised, at the author's request, by Stuart Gilbert.". This edition still contained errors but by its fourth revised printing (April 1939) it was considered the most accurate offering of the text and subsequently used as the basis for many later editions of the novel.[212][213][210]
- New York: Random House, 1934: The first authorised U.S. edition,[214] published after the decision in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses finding that the book was not obscene.[212] Random House's founder Bennett Cerf chose to base this edition on a copy of the pirated Samuel Roth edition of 1929, which led it to reproduce many of that edition's errors.[215][216]
- London: Bodley Head, 1936: The first edition printed and published in England. Set from the second impression of Odyssey Press's edition and proofed by Joyce.[217][212]
- Bodley Head, 1960: Newly reset corrected edition based on the 1958 impression of the earlier Bodley Head edition.[218] The source for many later editions by other publishers.
- Random House, 1961: Reset from the 1960 Bodley Head edition.
- Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Garland, 1984: Edited by Hans Walter Gabler.
- Ulysses: A Reader's Edition. Lilliput Press, 1997: Edited by Danis Rose.
- ^ Where the title is omitted the edition is titled Ulysses.
"Joyce Wars"
Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition was the most sustained attempt to produce a corrected text, but it has received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd's main theoretical criticism is of Gabler's choice of a patchwork of manuscripts as his copy-text (the base edition with which the editor compares each variant), but this fault stems from an assumption of the Anglo-American tradition of scholarly editing rather than the blend of French and German editorial theories that actually lay behind Gabler's reasoning.[219] The choice of a composite copy-text is seen to be problematic in the eyes of some American editors, who generally favour the first edition of any particular work as copy-text.[219]
Less subject to differing national editorial theories, however, is the claim that for hundreds of pages—about half the episodes of Ulysses—the extant manuscript is purported to be a "fair copy" that Joyce made for sale to a potential patron. (As it turned out, John Quinn, the Irish-American lawyer and collector, purchased the manuscript.) Diluting this charge somewhat is the fact that the theory of (now lost) final working drafts is Gabler's own. For the suspect episodes, the existing typescript is the last witness. Gabler attempted to reconstruct what he called "the continuous manuscript text", which had never physically existed, by adding together all of Joyce's accretions from the various sources. This allowed Gabler to produce a "synoptic text" indicating the stage at which each addition was inserted. Kidd and even some of Gabler's own advisers believe this method meant losing Joyce's final changes in about two thousand places.[219] Far from being "continuous", the manuscripts seem to be opposite. Jerome McGann describes in detail the editorial principles of Gabler in his article for the journal Criticism, issue 27, 1985.[220] In the wake of the controversy, still other commentators charged that Gabler's changes were motivated by a desire to secure a fresh copyright and another seventy-five years of royalties beyond a looming expiration date.
In June 1988 John Kidd published "The Scandal of Ulysses" in The New York Review of Books,[219] charging that not only did Gabler's changes overturn Joyce's last revisions, but in another four hundred places Gabler failed to follow any manuscript whatever, making nonsense of his own premises. Kidd accused Gabler of unnecessarily changing Joyce's spelling, punctuation, use of accents, and all the small details he claimed to have been restoring. Instead, Gabler was actually following printed editions such as that of 1932, not the manuscripts. Gabler was found to have made genuine blunders, such as his changing the name of the real-life Dubliner Harry Thrift to 'Shrift' and cricketer Captain Buller to 'Culler' on the basis of handwriting irregularities in the extant manuscript. (These "corrections" were undone by Gabler in 1986.) Kidd stated that many of Gabler's errors resulted from Gabler's use of facsimiles rather than original manuscripts.
In December 1988, Charles Rossman's "The New Ulysses: The Hidden Controversy" for The New York Review revealed that some of Gabler's own advisers felt too many changes were being made, but that the publishers were pushing for as many alterations as possible. Then Kidd produced a 174-page critique that filled an entire issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, dated the same month. This "Inquiry into Ulysses: The Corrected Text" was published the next year in book format and on floppy disk by Kidd's James Joyce Research Center at Boston University.
Gabler and others, including Michael Groden, have rejected Kidd's critique. In his 1993 afterword to the Gabler edition, Groden writes that Kidd's lists of supposed errors were constructed "with so little demonstrated understanding of Gabler's theoretical assumptions and procedures ... that they can point to errors or misjudgments only by accident." The scholarly community remains divided.
Gabler edition dropped
In 1990, Gabler's American publisher Random House, after consulting a committee of scholars,[221] replaced the Gabler edition with its 1961 version, and in the United Kingdom the Bodley Head press revived its 1960 version (upon which Random House's 1961 version is based). In both the UK and US, Everyman's Library also republished the 1960 Ulysses. In 1992, Penguin dropped Gabler and reprinted the 1960 text. The Gabler version remained available from Vintage International. Reprints of the 1922 first edition have also become widely available since 1 January 2012, when this edition entered the public domain under U.S. copyright law.[222]
In 1992, W. W. Norton announced that it would publish Kidd's much-anticipated edition of Ulysses as part of "The Dublin Edition of the Works of James Joyce" series. This book had to be withdrawn when the Joyce estate objected. For a period thereafter the estate refused to authorise any further editions of Joyce's work. This ended when it agreed to allow Wordsworth Editions to bring out a bargain version of the novel (a reprint of the 1932 Odyssey Press edition) in January 2010, ahead of copyright expiration in 2012.[223][224]
