Ulysses: A Facsimile of the First Edition Published in Paris in 1922 [THIS COPY BOUND UPSIDE DOWN AND IN VARIANT BINDING COLOR]

A Facsimile of the First Edition Published in Paris in 1922

The Orchises Ulysses is a hardcover, sewn, full-size reproduction of the first edition as published in Paris in 1922. Unlike the facsimile in the Oxford World Classics, the dimensions of the pages in the Orchises facsimile are those of the original volume -- hence it is possible to read the book comfortably. Orchises has not altered the sequence of front matter or 'corrected' broken type. The colophon has been retained. The lettering on and the color of the front cover are the same as those seen on the volume published in 1922 in Paris by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company. As many know, the text of Ulysses is a complex one. Because the 1922 first printing was the one on which Joyce worked most intensively, it presents, even with its imperfections and tyopgraphical errors, the most reliable text for the general reader and for the scholar. The Orchises Ulysses is printed on acid-balanced paper, is smythe sewn, and is bound in Roxite grade B cloth. It is designed for both the shelf of a public library and the collection of a private reader.

Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus