Ulysses in London
Harriet Shaw Weaver was determined to find a publisher for Ulysses as early as 1918, when her proposal to Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press was refused. In early 1920, Weaver signed a contract to bring out the novel herself. By the time she printed this announcement in 1921, however, Joyce had already signed a publishing agreement with Sylvia Beach, whose Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses was priced too high for most readers. Both for financial reasons and as a democratic imperative, Weaver planned to issue a cheaper “ordinary edition.” Beach was skeptical that the novel would ever be legal in Britain and resented Weaver for threatening her own advance sales.
Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961)
Prospectus for Ulysses by James Joyce
London: Egoist Press, 1921
The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Sean and Mary Kelly, 2018; PML 197833
Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of Harriet Shaw Weaver
Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
Portrait of Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1925
Graphite and unknown medium
Courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York
© Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust / Bridgeman Images
An Egoist Copy Saved from the Fire
Harriet Shaw Weaver was finally able to bring out her Egoist Ulysses in an edition of two thousand copies in October 1922. To evade legal troubles in England, she partnered with John Rodker to print it in France, from Sylvia Beach’s typeset plates. Bound in the same blue wrappers, its resemblance to the first edition initially unsettled Beach.
In December 1922 Weaver learned that US Customs had seized up to five hundred copies of her shipment to America, prompting her to commission five hundred replacements from the printer right away. Joyce took the opportunity to correct some of the hundreds of errors made by the French typesetters in the Beach’s first edition. The replacements never made it to America either, however, as British Customs destroyed the books in the harbor. This is one of approximately seven known copies of the five hundred replacements to survive.
James Joyce (1882–1941)
Ulysses
London: published for the Egoist Press by John Rodker, Paris, 1922 [i.e., 1923]
The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased on the Gordon N. Ray Fund for the Sean and Mary Kelly Collection, 2017: PML 196725