When Joyce signed a contract with publisher Bennett Cerf’s Random House in 1932, Ulysses was still illegal in the United Sates. In partnership with ACLU lawyer Morris Ernst, Cerf set out to challenge the ban by importing a copy of Ulysses in plain sight, coaxing the government to put the book on trial. The package entered New York harbor unnoticed and made its way to Cerf’s office, prompting Ernst to return it to US Customs agents and, putting on an act, demand that the “suspicious” package be opened and subsequently seized. Within a few days, Cerf sent a circular letter to “editors, critics, authors, clergymen, members of the bar, sociologists, psychologists, teachers and libraries” to solicit opinions about the novel. Letters received in response became part of a strategic body of documentation, attesting to the book’s artistic value. In court Ernst argued for the novel’s literary merits. Judge John Munro Woolsey’s 1933 decision agreed that Ulysses was “a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind”—its allegedly obscene passages more likely to nauseate than sexually arouse. Woolsey’s friends printed his opinion in this pamphlet as the “latest . . . book review by Judge Woolsey.”

Moments after Judge Woolsey’s 6 December 1933 ruling, word was handed down to Random House’s typesetters to begin printing. Ulysses was published in America on 25 January 1934 in an edition of around ten thousand. The novel’s backstory and Bennett Cerf’s marketing strategies had all but guaranteed a smash hit. By 1939 over fifty thousand copies had been sold. Woolsey’s legal decision was printed at the front of the book, and Joyce contributed a letter about its publication history in place of an introduction.

Ernst Reichl, the lead designer at H. Wolff, which manufactured the Random House edition, combined his own elongated lettering on the dust jacket with eighteenth-century Baskerville inside and slightly altered versions of Ernst Rodolf Weiss's brand-new capitals. His innovative work achieved a modern aesthetic that simultaneously evoked the full-page ornate initials associated with medieval page design. Reichl had already won an AIGA award for a book with a double-page title spread, though the lettering had appeared only on the recto. For the double-spread title of Ulysses, however, a large U stands alone on the facing page, serving both as text and image. It became a landmark of modern graphic design.