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 to take account of differences in various editions and provide a good reading version of the novel. For people who wish to use the site in conjunction with a physical 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 strongly challenged soon afterward by John Kidd, is still seen by many professional Joyceans as the best available version. I count myself skeptical, questioning both the literary merits of hundreds of particular choices in that edition and its underlying methodology of privileging early textual variants over ones ratified later in the publication history.  When in doubt, I prefer to trust the process by which the errata-riddled text of 1922 was slowly improved in printings that Joyce authorized through the 1930s. But the Gabler team did, unquestionably, make many good changes to those texts. Quite a few of my notes offer opinions about their choices—good, bad, and indifferent.