The handmade paper in this edition is a little thinner, though the deckle edges are still present. Five hundred of those 2,000 copies were confiscated by New York Postal authorities on the grounds of obscenity. With another small print run, the book reads, “This Edition is limited to 2000 copies of handmade paper numbered from 1 to 2000. The Egoist Press bought the text plates from the Dijon printer, Maurice Darantiere, so the body of the text looks the same. The Burns Library copy of the first English edition, otherwise known as the second printing of the first edition, is in quite different condition. Ulysses by James Joyce, published by Egoist Press, 1922, PR 6019. On Februthe first edition of Ulysses was published in Paris, followed closely by the English first edition on Octoby the Egoist Press. The novel was first serialized in the Little Review. The then current editors of the journal were indicted in 1921 on obscenity charges for publishing the Nausicca section of the text, and all hope of publication into novel form seemed to recede until Beach offered to publish it ( Dictionary of Literary Biography). Two years after they first met, the combination of Joyce’s genius and Beach’s adept handling of printers, money, advertising, and Joyce himself, resulted in the publication of Ulysses. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, and John Dos Passos. Acting as a bookshop, lending library, bank, and post office, Sylvia Beach’s shop was peopled by such writers as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T. Shakespeare and Company served as the central social, literary, and financial hub for writers in Paris during the 1920s.

On JIrish author James Joyce met Sylvia Beach, an American transplant to Paris who had opened a bookshop called Shakespeare and Company a little under a year before. Joyce talking with publishers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier at Shakespeare & Co., Paris, 1920, image from the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Ulysses shakespeare and company