In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, James Joyce wrote of the first editoin of Ulysses: 'I am extremely irritated by all the printer's errors. Are these to be perpetuated in future editions? I hope not.' Conscientious attempts have been made in the course of the book's publishing history to correct the errors Joyce complained of, but the limited success of these efforts has been outweighed by new corruption which has arisen when type has been reset. Joyce's hope was not fulfilled until 1984, when a critical edition of the work, the fruit of seven years' textual research by a team of scholars led by Professor Hans Walter Gabler of the Department of English Philology at the University of Munich, was published by Garland Publishing Inc. of New York, with a synoptic analysis of the evolution of the work, and the reading text which it established, printed on facing pages.

That text is now made available by itself for the general reader. As Professor Gabler explains in an afterword, it is based on the rich array of surviving documents which embody the work's development: not only the original manuscripts, but Joyce's handwritten corrections, additions and revisions on the typerscripts and on the proofs of the first edition. This edition is thus, as nearly as editorial skill and critical understanding have been able to make it, a non-corrupted counterpart to the first edition of 1922. It supersedes that and all subsequent texts. To facilitate reference the line-numbering of the critical edition has been retained.

Many of the five thousand and more changes introduced by Professor Gabler concern the 'accidentals' of punctuation and spelling, but as Richard Ellmann points out in his preface there are also substantive changes, some of which provide important illumination of previously obscure passages, one in particular throwing the whole theme of Joyce's masterpiece into shar relief.

Here is Ulysses as James Joyce wrote and revised it.