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.