The notoriety associated with the censorship of Ulysses in America was in large measure the cause of the early succès de scandale of the first edition. Although from the very first there were critics, like Sisley Huddleston, who proclaimed Ulysses a masterpiece and Joyce a literary genius, the initial boom in sales was directly attributed to the misguided impression that it was a "pornographic" work. The article by "Aramis" in The Sporting Times helped establish that impression and attracted many new customers to Ulysses, most of whom did not get what they expected.

A. A copy of the advertisement for The Sporting Times — known as the Pink ’un — of 1 April 1922 that Sylvia Beach displayed prominently at Shakespeare & Co. Beside it is a photo of Beach and Joyce in her office just after the publication of Ulysses: notice the Pink ’un poster on the wall. As the torn corner of the poster in the picture makes clear, this is not the same copy.

B. Joyce always maintained that his true contemporary audience was other writers and artists. More often than not, they proved to misunderstand him and his circle of modernists. In her essay in the Criterion, "Character in Fiction" (July 1924), Virginia Woolf speaks for her Bloomsbury colleagues when she calls Ulysses "a waste of energy."

C. At the top right is a photo of the Joyce family, signed by James, Nora, Lucia and George Joyce and dated "Paris | 22.iii.924" for Sylvia Beach.

D. Contemporary newspaper articles and essays in literary journals help gauge the early reception of Ulysses. For example, The Daily Sketch (London, 18 September 1922), laments the poverty of current intellectual life and suggests that Ulysses may have "silenced" other artists.

E. The influential literary magazine, The Dial (vol. 72, no. 6, June 1922), was quick to respond to the furor created by the publication of Ulysses. In the "Dublin Letter" John Eglinton reveals that he does not fully understand Ulysses, even the parts in which his character appears. In his "Paris Letter" Ezra Pound issues a supportive call for a symposium to properly review the book.

F. Seemingly overnight Joyce became an international celebrity with the publication of Ulysses. As mainstream a publication as Vanity Fair (April 1922) included him in a survey of ten critics’ reviews of the "whole field of life and thought of 100 modern figures." On a scale of —25 to +25, Joyce averages a +11.5, falling behind Charlie Chaplin yet pulling ahead of Sigmund Freud in popularity.

G. On the other side of the Pink ’un is a copy of Ulysses, first edition, third printing, published for the Egoist Press, London, by John Rodker, Paris, January 1923. There are 500 numbered copies and an uncertain quantity of unnumbered copies, all printed on vergé à barbes by Maurice Darantiere, Dijon.

This is one of the unnumbered copies. This printing was made to replace a quarter of the copies of the second printing that had been seized and burned by the U. S. customs office. The exact number of destroyed copies is unknown but the third printing states the number as 500. Ironically, most copies of the third printing were seized and confiscated by the English customs authorities at Folkestone. All subsequent editions have claimed that 499 out of 500 copies were destroyed but this cannot be correct since at least three copies are known to have survived.

Both the second and third printings of Ulysses include a small number of corrections made to the text in addition to a list of errata.

H. Among so many in our collection, these three articles show the customs officials’ zeal to confiscate the banned book on both sides of the Atlantic. These articles also document the ever more stealthy modes that were devised to ship copies of Ulysses to England and the United States. Furthermore, rumors of a secret index of censored books and of the Chicago and New York Mafia’s involvement in "book-legging" were ubiquitous in journals world-wide. From left to right: Journal Courier, Louisville, Kentucky (4 December 1927); Cape Argus, Cape Town, South Africa (23 October 1928); and New York Evening Post (14 February, 1929).

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