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 ongoing effort, doomed to certain failure, 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, despite the controversy, as by far the best available version. I take a skeptical approach to this canonical text, questioning both the literary merits of 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. Many of my notes comment on Gabler's changes—sometimes affirmatively,  sometimes critically, and sometimes simply to ask how adopting them might affect the reading of a passage.