The first thing you notice about the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses is its heft. She offered to publish the novel for a disheartened and discouraged Joyce, and the book duly appeared in time for Joyce’s fortieth birthday in February 1922.Ī facsimile of this text has now been republished by Cambridge University Press under the editorial guidance of Catherine Flynn, a Cork-born Joycean based at Berkeley, California. An American expatriate, Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, came to the rescue. As a result, no publisher wanted to touch the full novel. Copies were seized and destroyed, and the editors of the journal prosecuted for obscenity. Some episodes from the novel had appeared in the American modernist magazine The Little Review.

Ulysses, the scandalous, ‘obscene’ book, was scuppered by censors even before it was launched. The story of how James Joyce’s masterpiece was published is well known. But the one that had lured us down Swanston Street was the iconic first edition, with its famous blue cover, fortuitously acquired by the SLV in 1922. We examined some special books, including lavish editions of Ulysses: the 1935 Limited Editions Club edition, with Matisse’s accompanying etchings the 1988 Arion Press edition, with illustrations by Robert Motherwell – and various others. Earlier this year, I took a group of students to the State Library of Victoria (SLV) to see its impressive Joyce collection.

The cambridge centenary ulysses