Text and Pagination
The many print editions of Ulysses
contain literally thousands of textual variants. The text on
this site does not reproduce that of any printed copy. It
represents one person's perpetually unfinished effort to look
afresh at all the variants and provide the best possible version
of the novel. For users who wish to align the site's words with
those of a book, buttons divide the continuous scrollable text
into the discrete pages found in five different printed texts.
Only pagination is reproduced, not lineation.
Apply first edition pagination
reproduces the pages of the original 1922 Shakespeare and
Company edition, reprinted in recent years as an Orchises Press
hardcover facsimile and as Oxford University Press and Dover
Publications paperbacks.
Apply Wordsworth pagination
reproduces the pages of the paperback issued by Wordsworth
Editions, based on the first Odyssey Press edition of 1932.
Apply Alma Classics pagination reproduces
the pages of hardcover and paperback books printed by Alma
Classics Ltd., using the fourth and final Odyssey Press edition
of 1939.
Apply Modern Library pagination
reproduces the pages of the hardcover Modern Library text as
re-edited in 1961, also sold by Random House as Vintage
paperbacks.
Apply Gabler pagination
reproduces the pages of Random House's 1986 edition, also
printed in Vintage paperbacks, which presents a slightly revised
version of Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 three-volume Garland
edition.
The Gabler Ulysses, touted at its
release as "the corrected text" but eviscerated soon afterward
by John Kidd, is still seen by many professional Joyceans as the
best available version. I am not convinced. I question both the
literary merits of many particular editorial choices and the
underlying methodology of privileging early textual variants
over ones ratified later in the publication history. When
in doubt, I prefer to err on the side of trusting the process by
which the errata-riddled text of 1922 was slowly improved in
printings that Joyce authorized through the 1930s. Many of my
notes comment on Gabler's changes—good, bad, and indifferent.