I suppose he wants readers, but he is perfectly prepared to do without readers.
—Sisley Huddleston, review of Ulysses (March 1922)
No ten men or women out of a hundred can read Ulysses through, and of the ten who succeed in doing so, five of them will do it as a tour de force.
—Joseph Collins, review of Ulysses (May 1922)
I
Who read Ulysses? Or, to be more precise, who read Ulysses after the first batch of copies was printed and bound between February 1 and 16 March 1922, the day when an exhausted Maurice Darantière could proudly declare, “The binding of Ulysses is complete” [“Le brochage de Ulysses est achevé”].1 If two of the earliest reviews excerpted above are to be trusted, then the answer could have been anywhere between zero and one hundred (10 percent of the total first printed), but everyone would have had to agree that the original readership could not exceed one thousand.2 By mid-April of the previous year, the total number of copies was already a known quantity (even if the people who would buy them were not), and for the subscription forms and other promotional material that circulated soon thereafter, it was broken down further by price to attract different kinds of readers (100 copies at 350 francs, 150 at 250 francs, and 750 at 150 francs).3 Some committed early, and in hard cash, others sent back subscription forms and later changed their minds, and still others subscribed, paid, and then waited to see if their copies would arrive (and with the exception of a few in New York City, they did).4 Eager to trace the genetic evolution of Ulysses or map out its itineraries in further editions, impressions, and translations, critics interested in the reception don’t dwell very long on the nine months that passed between February 2, when copies first began to trickle in, and October 12 when a second numbered edition of two thousand copies appeared from the same plates allegedly selling out in four days.5 It’s easy to see why: after all the travails involving censors, typists, customs officers, and publishers, Ulysses was finally in print, its readers were beginning to receive copies, the reviewers were slowly beginning to assess the contents, and the rest, as they say, is literary history.
It’s the second step in the process that deserves much more of our attention. These first subscribers, visualized on a map here, are what happens (figure 4.1).6 Often lumped together as the group lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, or treated as a cohort of opportunistic investors, they are the reason that Ulysses exists at all, important enough, in fact, to be the subject of Beach’s earliest essay dealing, in part, with her fascination about “How They Grew.”7 Without this batch of subscribers, Darantière’s bill of 42,492.55 francs would have been impossible for Beach to cover on her own, especially when you consider that she was only generating 100 francs or so a day from her bookshop (though I should add that three-quarters, maybe more, of the payments arrived after the publication).8 But more than simply crowdsourcing production costs, the so-called Ulysses subscribers were also helping to define what this novel meant at a time when it was more of a curious object getting measured than it was a literary work getting read.9 And while for Beach, each paid subscription translated into badly needed francs, for Joyce, it was an opportunity to watch his readership grow while episodes of the novel were still being written and revised.
If the difficulty of Ulysses would soon end up alienating or shocking the common reader, this was a time when author and publisher could capitalize on the convenience of the subscribed reader, which in this case included private individuals, booksellers, critics, export agents, collectors, and curiosity seekers who had to pay up in advance to receive a copy (or copies) of the book through the mail once it was published.10 Indeed, the kind of reader who could purchase “legally obscene texts” through private subscription lists dates back several decades, and at this moment in time there was no other option if Ulysses was going to circulate at all in the United States or the United Kingdom.11 These subscribed readers were knowingly supporting the production and distribution of a banned book, one that was not intended originally for purchase in bookstores or to be borrowed from libraries.12 Paris was the perfect city for such an enterprise because the French authorities, Rachel Potter explains, “were not interested in prosecuting publishers of English-language material that was being transported off French soil.”13 If trouble was to be found, it would be upon the attempted entry into the English-speaking countries where Ulysses was banned.
Subscribed readers were part of an exclusive group, each one of them corresponding with a unique number.14 A few of the copy numbers were carefully assigned (#1 for Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce’s patron, #1,000 for Nora, his spouse), but for the most part, they were dashed off to readers as soon as the small batches arrived.15 Readers would have had little, if any, knowledge of who else was out there, but not so for Beach. As the hands-on publisher involved with packaging each one (and sometimes with the author’s assistance), she was in a position to identify most if not all of the subscribers by name, address, and copy number.16 And unlike the “implied reader,” which Wayne Booth defined as the imagined recipient of an author, the subscribed reader is “real.” In fact, the entire transaction between subscriber, publisher, and author depended upon the reality of that readership if the novel was expected to circulate at all. Finding them, however, turned out to be more time consuming than Joyce expected. Instead of having a batch of printed books up for sale, the subscription process required a lot of back and forth. Along the way, he seems to have forgotten Pound’s advice from 1917 about the potential readers of Portrait. “How many intelligent people,” Pound asked him then, “do you think that there are in England and America? If you will write for the intelligent, how THE HELL do you expect your books to sell by the 100,000 ? ? ? ? ? ?”17
Tracking the subscribers of Ulysses is one way to gather important empirical data about its first readers, who they were and where they were located. More than that, it lets us access a foundational moment in literary history not on the scale of years or decades or even centuries but in the days, weeks, and months as the novel started moving out into the world. This is the compressed time span that critics skip over in order to get to the livelier parts of the novel’s life as it moved toward canonical legitimacy. But no matter how many editions continue to get printed or digitized now and in the future, Ulysses will always be a book that first appeared in a print run of one thousand, even if Joyce first recommended printing a “dozen or so,” lamenting to Beach at a later stage, “you won’t sell a copy of it.”18
Lawrence Rainey first argued that this limited quantity was a tactical maneuver from the start intended to attract collectors and investors, but he plays down the fact that one thousand was at the upper limit of what author, publisher, and printer could imagine at the time (ten months before publication), and that wasn’t just because of the production costs. It had just as much to do with the process by which the readerly desire of the subscribers gets measured, and it involved trying to calculate, at a particular moment in time, just how many readers would want to buy a copy.
So even though Ulysses ended up having three different prices, they were all worth one thousand copies. It was a quantity common enough in the late 1400s, when the printing press was first invented, and still five hundred years later, it was a respectable size for a coterie audience more patient with literary experiments than a commercial one.19 One thousand is as much a concrete number for this print run as it is a symbolic one, precise yet rounded off to identify the symmetry of a closed system, or perhaps, of a creative process that had a beginning, middle, and end. One thousand was more than the sixty or one hundred that Pound believed he needed to accommodate the readers of his XVI Cantos, but definitely not large enough to match the critical appraisal that would appear at different points in the 1920s and 1930s when Ulysses was getting established as, what Morris Ernst would call, a highly popularized “modern classic.”20
Looking back a century later, it might seem odd that such a small number of copies was printed, but why would it be otherwise given the circumstances? Publishers in the United States and the United Kingdom were deterred for legal and economic reasons, the little magazine where it first appeared had stopped the serialization two years earlier, and there is no evidence to suggest that Beach, Darantière, or Joyce ever thought the first print run should be higher.21 “The publication of Ulysses was arranged here in a couple of days,” Joyce told John Quinn matter-of-factly, and without further ado, that was that.22 One thousand copies wasn’t unnecessarily low for any of the parties involved: it was a sufficient projection based on the amount of readerly desire that could be imagined at a specific moment in the novel’s history. And if Dante the poet used one thousand to signify an endless quantity of sinners shown to Dante the pilgrim by Vergil, and in the Bible, as the number assigned to the sum of wives and concubines of King Solomon showing his splendor, in the publication history of Ulysses, it was just high enough, and just expensive enough, for Joyce to wonder if enough readers could be found.23
The act of measuring this readerly desire played a role in the reception of Ulysses not only in late 1922—when the rapid release of a second English edition prompted Joyce to declare, “No bibliophile has the right to tell me how many copies of my book are to be inflicted on a tolerant world” (the number was 2,000; 499 burned by Customs officials in Folkestone, England)—but also in 1927 when he claimed to have lost royalties on 250,000 copies in the United States because of Samuel Roth’s pirated edition.24 In a mathematical calculation worthy of that pseudoscientific narrator in episode 17, Joyce informed the defense, “that the sales of the book in the United States, published at a minimum price of ten dollars a copy with a royalty to me of fifteen or twenty per cent, with an English-reading population of a hundred and twenty million as contrasted with the small English-reading public in France, would have brought me at least six or seven times as much, viz., five hundred thousand dollars.”25
Joyce’s calculation of a lost readership is not based on actual data. But it is revealing both for what it tells us about his wish to punish the book-pirate Roth as it is with his estimation about how many there may have been in the first place. Out of 120 million inhabitants, 250,000 might not seem such a large percentage, but Joyce is basing the size of a lost audience against the population of the entire United States as presented in the 1920 Census, one that did not take into account the rates of literacy of its “English-reading population.”26 As part of his argument, it’s also worth noting the quick reference to “the small-English reading public in France,” by which he means his first readers. One thousand has become a small public, but he also pretends as if the first readers belonged only to France. When Random House was finally able to publish the first U.S. edition in 1934, Bennett Cerf and his team arrived at a much lower projection of ten thousand. With advanced orders, it turned out too modest to meet the initial demand of twelve thousand, but at least it was based on actual data that his team compiled by directly contacting hundreds of libraries and bookstores.27
Getting that distribution number calculated when the obscenity ban lifted was one thing but finding actual subscribers for that first edition when it was firmly in place was quite another. By the time two copies arrived via express train from Dijon on February 2, 1922, only ten thousand francs (from fifty different subscribers) had actually been paid.28 Subscribers may have been eager to return their forms, but very few were willing to pay up until the book was actually in print (figure 4.2). That delay in payment also has something to do with the time-consuming nature of this process, one that began ten months earlier when Joyce and Beach began assembling an audience: subscription forms, designed by Adrienne Monnier, were printed by Darantière in Dijon, sent to Beach in Paris, then shipped off to potential subscribers in twenty-three different countries who, in turn, would fill them out, send them back, and wait “a long, long time.”29 When the printing was near completion, another form was dispatched by Beach asking subscribers for payment before copies would be wrapped and sent. Though expedient, given the circumstances, subscriptions were still far from efficient, and the book-keeping was chaotic and inconsistent.
At an early stage, one that likely coincided with the arrival of the first subscription forms, Joyce compiled a two-page wish list of his own containing sixty-seven names and addresses, which can be divided further into eleven different countries (one principality, Monaco) with the greatest number of potential subscribers in England (thirteen) followed by the United States (twelve), Italy (eleven), France (eleven), Switzerland (seven), and Ireland (five). It’s a snapshot of readers Joyce expected to rely on, a majority of them personal acquaintances from his years in Dublin, Trieste, and Zurich mixed in with a few of his more recently discovered counterparts and patrons scattered across Europe.30 Out of sixty-seven potential subscribers, twenty-seven of them received copies with at least five of them taken from the unnumbered press pile. In another list intended for potential reviewers, librarians, and general influencers, the results did not turn out very promising either. Out of seventy-eight names, only thirteen ended up with copies. A 28 percent return on his wish list and, assuming each subscriber took a single copy, more than 958 copies left to sell: if nothing more, these numbers prove that Joyce was better suited at writing his novel than he was at finding readers for it.
Thankfully for him, there were others to help out with the promotion, but it still proved challenging. There was a grass-roots campaign taking place with local admirers from Paris, but there were also two thousand “prospectuses” dispatched around the world in mid-May followed up by another one thousand in early July and another one thousand in late September.31 The number of sold and promised subscribers was not easy to keep track of because bookstores often changed their orders by letter; Beach kept payment and copy number information on subscription slips (presumably when sending them out), payment logs, and three different address books. There was also the added problem of having subscribers change their minds, which helps to explain why, when writing a limerick in Beach’s honor, Joyce decided on the following lines: Throngs about her rant and rave/To subscribe for Ulysses/But, having signed, they ponder grave.32
Others have tried to balance Beach’s books in search of lost or damaged copies and missing subscribers, but even now, individual copy owners cannot be identified, and that’s in addition to the pile of four hundred or so distributed through the bulk orders of individual bookstores. So, 1,022 copies were printed (counting the two copies Darantière retained), but not according to the original plan, and we have complete information [name, address, and copy numbers] on 324 subscribers, 786 copy numbers, and with incomplete information can account for 957 copies to 416 different subscribers.33
In her memoir, Beach describes Joyce waiting around the bookstore for orders to arrive, while Richard Ellmann colorfully adds that he could also be found “fondling the subscription lists.”34 From Joyce’s letters at the time, it’s evident that what may looked like absent-minded fondling was actually something more deliberate: counting. “About 400 subscriptions are made,” Joyce told Harriet Shaw Weaver on November 1, 1921 (made, mind you, not paid).35 A month after the first English review of Ulysses appeared, Robert McAlmon and Ezra Pound would find out that there were “136 orders,” while Weaver was informed the same day that there were “145 letters asking for prospectuses” and his brother Stanislaus that “148 copies were ordered” with the added information that “only fifty of the deluxe and about eighty of the 250 franc [were left], so the bowsies had better hurry up.”36 One hundred and thirty-six, 145, 148, 50, and 80: these are not approximate numbers. In fact, their exactness betrays an anxiety that the extraordinary efforts in composing the novel may not be appreciated by the public. Success, in other words, was measurable not by the total number of sales, since that was already a known quantity, but by the fact that each and every copy within that known quantity could be accounted for.
And with all this waiting around, the absences were notable as well. Among the more contentious was the one involving George Bernard Shaw, who received Beach’s prospectus but refused to commit. He responded to Pound’s angry denunciations by sending along a postcard of Jusepe de Ribera’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, which he recaptioned: “Miss Shakespeare consoling James Joyce, who has fainted on hearing of the refusal of his countryman to subscribe for Ulysses. Isn’t it like him?”37 Joyce blamed Shaw’s refusal on the steep price tag, telling Weaver (two years later) that “he ought to be informed that there is now a special cheap edition 565,423 words=8 × 70,877 ⅞ = 8 novel lengths, slightly shopsoiled, a genuine bargain going for 60 francs = 60/68 = 30/43 = about ¾ ×20 / − = 15/− ÷ 8 about 1/11 ¼ per normal novel suitlength real continental style—you can’t beat it for the money.”38 Unwilling to accept the fact that Shaw would remain a “missing subscriber” forever, Joyce bet his friend Frank Budgen “4.75 francs” that he would order a copy anonymously through a bookshop.39 Joyce lost, but it’s highly unlikely Budgen ever got paid.40
II
Joyce’s knowledge about the readers of Ulysses, both present and absent, was unique during these months. He knew who and where they were in a way he never would again. But that is one of the reasons why that final sign-off on the last page of his novel is so significant. In the most basic terms, he provided the coordinates of his own location during and after the composition of the novel. By doing so he had also, quite literally, provided an address to the reader, one that we can imagine as a response to the ones he kept finding on the subscription forms from those same individuals who promised to “pay on receipt of notice announcing that the volume has appeared.”41 And while it is an address that may be less shocking, say, than Jane Eyre’s (Reader, I married him!), it still provides a jarring exit from the fictional world set in Dublin some eighteen years earlier. Reader, I am here, in Paris, now! is the message inscribed on that last page, and it works precisely by asking each member of his audience to consider another question: And where are you? The answers will change as the generations do but never the question. This exchange between sender and receiver is part of the pact that all readers make with Ulysses. To arrive at the end of the novel means to confront where you are but always with the knowledge of where Ulysses once was.
Using the address notebooks and lists she first compiled in 1921, Beach was one of the first to try and reconstruct where it all happened. Her answer: “all over the globe.”42 First, there was the “list of Egoist readers” in England (probably including the 150 orders from Weaver’s abandoned first edition), followed by a “good many French subscribers” mostly in Paris. In addition, there were American subscribers, including the “Little Review crowd” (saving her “a great deal of postage by coming over to Paris and subscribing in person”) and last but not least were the more exotic ones from “far-off places like Sarawak, the Straits Settlements, China, Borneo, etc.” It’s no surprise to find the Egoist readers, French subscribers, and the Little Review crowd in the mix, but in Beach’s account the news about Ulysses spread far beyond her “little bookshop” and who knows, really, how many destinations that “etc.” covers.43
Looking back on it all from the distance of more than three decades, Beach remembers Ulysses as an instantaneous global success, a novel that conquered the world in one thousand copies almost as soon as it appeared. The problem with this version of events, however, is that it’s wildly untrue. Not just the timing, as I mentioned before, but also the spacing. Indeed, a majority of the copies arrived in France, England, and the United States (over the course of the next ten months), but if we follow the paper trail there were no subscribers from the “far-off places” of China, Borneo, Sarawak, and the Straits Settlements.44 Beach’s mistake, or convenient distortion of the facts, is significant since it reveals a much bigger problem about the way the reception history of Ulysses has often been treated over the past century. She sees, or thinks she sees, a global audience at a time when copies of the book were incredibly scarce. It was this scarcity that ended up increasing the desire for copies, which would not be freely available for another decade after the ban was lifted in the United States. In 1922 and for much of the decade, however, Ulysses was still a book more talked about than read, prompting Kenner’s astute observation that “All the early discussions have this curious property, that readers who had never seen a copy were required to assume Joyce’s book was what the protagonist of the moment said it was.”45
Given its canonical status in world literary history, it might be comforting to think that Ulysses has always been there as if Joyce anticipated Homer and not the other way around. In fact, efforts to measure its impact all too easily conflate literary value with global reach. But when did it become possible, or even desirable, to measure the value of this or any other literary work on a global scale shortly after its publication? This is a complex question but one that comes to bear on the way we think about reception more generally as something measurable not just for Ulysses in 1922 but throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first as bans were lifted and copyrights expired. Is the number of copies printed the best place to measure reception? How about the number of copies sold or the ones actually read (if that is even measurable)? We live in an age in which an instantaneous global blockbuster is common enough, and that’s due, in large part, to the arrival of the internet and the formation of conglomerates such as Amazon. In addition, there’s the rapid circulation of electronic texts and reliable publishing metrics keeping track of how many copies are sold, where, and to whom.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, none of this infrastructure existed: the distribution channels, technologies, and publishing platforms were still very much shaped by a book industry as it emerged at the end of the previous century. Publishers and booksellers were able to establish international networks for commercial distribution, but in England, at least, they were engineered for a market made up of university presses and commercial publishers catering to emerging markets while still capitalizing on the more established transnational, transatlantic, and European ones. Ulysses, then, might have had some geographical diversity with its small run, but it was not exceptional by any means. In fact, you could say it was global on a small scale, nowhere near as expansive as the most popular novelists from the previous century (including the market for republished classics).
As a useful counterpoint, consider the global literary reception model described by Pascale Casanova in The World Republic of Letters, one anchored in Paris, the same city from which the copies of Ulysses began their journey. In order to receive international consecration, literary works, she argues, need to be vetted by critics, translators, and editors in this Western metropolitan center before moving outward into the world. Though published by a bookseller in Paris, Ulysses complicates this model. The distribution itinerary, for instance, was determined by private subscription lists, so there was never any need to move through the official channels involving critics, editors, and translators in Paris before circulating internationally. And what’s more, translation was not an issue since it was a novel written in English, intended for export and therefore less objectionable to the French authorities. With the first edition we have a distribution model involving a novel intended for destinations elsewhere. In that way, it’s easy to see how fantasies about the global reach of Ulysses are so attractive. By not belonging to the country of its print origins, Ulysses was made to seem as if it was at home everywhere, even Borneo.
The United States, where it quickly became a “bootleg classic,” was a glaring exception.46 Copies of the first edition and the subsequent editions and impressions would get past customs officials until 1933, but the demand, which no one had a number for at the time, always exceeded the supply.47 But even with the contraband copies, this question about the number of readers became particularly valuable as the pressure to publish an American edition mounted. Given that the book was banned for more than a decade, how many readers were still interested? And if you can’t rely on the size of previous quantities for an audience made up largely of expats and English speakers in Paris, Europe, and the United Kingdom, then how do you go about measuring the desire that remains?
Crazy as it might sound, those are precisely the questions that Morris Ernst, an American attorney, and Bennett Cerf, the president of Random House, discussed when preparing their case against the United States in 1933. They knew that future readers were going to be found scattered across the country, but where? And how do you go about finding them? In search of answers, Ernst and Cerf sent out questionnaires to a pool of more than nine hundred university and public librarians, the very people on the front line of book distribution, who could provide some sense of the public’s opinion.48 “Has there been any demand in your library for it [Ulysses]?” they wanted to know, following up with the redundant question: “Much demand in your library for it?”49Turns out from the “several hundred” librarians who responded (285 total), there was, indeed, some demand, but it was by no means unanimous, and contrary to Ernst’s summary of the results in the brief prepared for the court, there were a lot of dissenting voices: 9 YESES and 3 NOS in California, 1 YES and 3 NOS in Colorado, 8 YESES and 9 NOS in Illinois, 1 YES and 1 NO in Vermont and Nebraska, and so on.50 The greatest demand came from the students (much more so than the public), but a majority of the librarians sampled still acknowledged that there was general value in its publication.
Based on the data collected from these questionnaires, Ernst and his legal team created a “Map of the United States Showing the Location of Libraries That Have Expressed a Desire to Circulate Ulysses.”51 The title pretty much sums up the contents: it’s a generic black and white map with fifty or so red dots indicating the states desirous of a copy (figure 4.3). There is no variation in the dot size that would indicate the differences in the number of responses per state, but it’s hard to miss the blank states in the middle of the continent juxtaposed against those clustered together on both coasts.52 This divide between the country and the city is not what Ernst wanted the court to notice. Instead, as he explains in a brief description, “The purpose of this map is to show that Ulysses has won nation-wide recognition and acclaim, and that it is not being championed by radical or ultrasophisticated literary cliques located in large metropolitan centres.”53
Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
It turns out that the demand of libraries is not the only thing getting mapped out here. It is also Ernst’s desire to control who and where the future readers would be and what they might mean as a nationally defined public. In an effort to generate the illusion of nation-wide consensus, Ernst was hoping to reduce the impact of intellectual communities in the various metropolises so Ulysses would seem less like an avant-garde import and more like a book made in America for honest, book-loving Americans. Readers, in this fantasy, are not simply urban dwellers: they are also country-folk, the kind usually snubbed by the literary elites. And if this is a map of readers that don’t yet exist, it is also one organized paradoxically around the idea that the novel they will read had already achieved nationwide recognition. Once copies become widely available, the public, then, does not need to judge for itself: Ulysses was deemed a modern classic while circulating illegally.
In the act of mapping desire to make their case, Ernst and his team ended up generating a fascinating document about the reception history of Ulysses, one that imagines the geographical distribution of future readers and circumvents any need for critical judgement since it has already happened. As the lawyer representing a publisher keen to remove an obscenity ban, Ernst was not interested in the veracity of the literary historical record. He needed to convince United States District Court Judge Woolsey that Random House could publish a novel that would not corrupt an innocent American public. In order to make a convincing case, Ulysses needed to seem like a book written for an American everyman, the type as much at home in the streets of New York City as in the fields of Lincoln, Nebraska. By doing so, however, Ernst played down the fact that he was inadvertently creating the conditions for a global readership that had been impossible before. Though tried in a United States court, the effects of the decision itself would be felt across the English-speaking world. And if this is a map of America’s desire for Ulysses, it is one that introduces the possibility of an entirely new population of readers that had been missing from the global tally since 1922.
Ernst never had an exact number of readers in mind for his legal brief, but that was something Random House needed to establish when preparing its first edition. By the time printed copies started to appear and bookstore orders poured in, Random House could barely keep up with the demand. By April 1934, less than three months after copies were printed, thirty-three thousand had been sold.54 That was more than the total number Shakespeare and Company sold in the eleven editions that appeared between 1922 and 1930 (twenty-eight thousand copies).55 Fast forward to the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition and that number from Random House would rise to 880,000 copies, and if you add the other 630,000 from the John Lane/Bodley Head edition in the United Kingdom, Ulysses far exceeded the million copy mark in the United States and United Kingdom alone.56
It is impossible to know whether or not that same number of copies would have sold in the early 1930s if access to Ulysses had not been blocked for more than a decade, but there’s nothing like an attenuated delay—and one caused by an obscenity charge no less—to entice potential readers. And though it was unable to receive a homecoming worthy of the hero after which it was named, Ulysses never disappeared entirely from public view: there was the piracy case against Samuel Roth, the arrival of a prominent French translation in 1929, Stuart Gilbert’s Study in 1930, and the Odyssey Press edition of 1932.
The increase from one thousand copies to 1.6 million copies took fifty years. But consider once again where it all started: zero to one thousand copies printed over the course of six weeks and distributed over a period of at least six months (figure 4.4).57 Adding the number of copies from the second edition published in 1922, even Herbert Gorman paused in his obsequious account of the “first year of its life” to remark: “This fact is amazing when we consider the tremendous amount of publicity concerning the book that was appearing in England, France, and America, and already spreading into several other countries.”58 For Gorman, as for Beach, the measure of Ulysses’s success was not to be found in the number of copies printed or sold: it belonged to the publicity, giving readers an account of the book when copies were hard to come by. As soon as it appeared, Ulysses managed to attract more readers than there were copies available and it did so, according to a hyperbolic Gorman, more than “any prohibited work had done before or since.”59
In this continued drive to give Ulysses immediate global recognition, the impact of that original number has been lost and with it an opportunity to examine a moment in the history of its reception when nothing extraordinary happened except the fact that it was finally in print. But instead of a reception history focused on critical responses, public reactions, and the biographical pedigree of readers, what if we instead took this number seriously, treating it as evidence of what many would consider a nonevent in literary history, the kind that lets us examine the complex relationship between the low numbers and a major shift in scale (reception, value, and computation)?60
In their “deep history” of human civilization, Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Small argue that these smaller-scale shifts can be just as significant as the larger ones. “A leap from human communities numbering in the tens of people to those numbering in the thousands,” they argue, “may be just as momentous for social relations as the leap from millions to hundreds of millions. Indeed, the smaller shift probably required more complicated and durable alterations in human interactive styles.”61 The publication of Ulysses may not be comparable to a population explosion in a Paleolithic society, but this kind of insight about deep history can help us think about the reception history of a single literary work more broadly. In this shift from zero to one thousand, Ulysses underwent a scalar leap that would subsequently shape literary relations throughout the twentieth century, but at this moment these effects were barely, if at all, discernible, and, as is true with so many other literary works across the millennia, they can’t be traced in the responses of critics or readers.
Instead, as I’ll argue, the effects are there in the geography, the scalar leap expressed in the circulation of copies outward from Paris to destinations worldwide. If the number of possible readers was a known quantity as early as April 1921, the locations where the copies would eventually arrive was not. And in the subsequent months as the supply decreased, Beach kept sales open to all, never limiting the number by city, country, or continent, or the bulk orders from bookstores on behalf of their anonymous clients. Even with the ban in the United States, Ulysses was still free to move around the world, and copies were being sold on a first-come-first-serve basis. That original pool of subscribers may have been precipitated in part by the prospectuses and word of mouth, but it generated a reading population for Ulysses as it existed at a specific time. Demand certainly exceeded supply, but at this early stage, as I mentioned before, we also need to remember that the subscriptions were trickling in slowly with a few promotional spikes. The readers who did not get copies of the first edition in early 1922 either didn’t know, didn’t care, or couldn’t afford it.
Measuring the geography of literary reception has long been the provenance of book historians, one of the most notable examples belonging to Lucien Febvre in L'apparition du livre in which he maps out the spread of printing presses to document the emergence of a European print culture between 1450 and 1800.62 Other critics have used similar cartographic methods to measure literary historical events and sociological processes, of which Pierre Bourdieu’s Les règles de l’art and Moretti’s The Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 are prominent examples, but they also include the “Mapping the Enlightenment” project at Stanford University, which uses the epistolary correspondence between leading Enlightenment figures to generate dynamic visualizations of the intellectual networks they created.
Mapping first subscribers, however, works a bit differently. It is first and foremost a way to access a reception history anchored in the geographical distribution of readers who received copies of a first edition. As interested as I am in visualizing the location of readers and copies by city, country, and continent, I do so in order to recuperate some of the concreteness of the experience of this novel at a particularly formative, if quiet, moment in its history. I say experience, which, of course, would imply that I am interested in events of the past that have already been digested, but equally urgent is the way this experience involved the expectation of a future whose meaning had not yet been revealed. Experience and expectation are at odds in that way largely because, as Reinhardt Koselleck explains, “past and future never coincide.” He continues: “Experience once made is as complete as its occasions are past; that which is to be done in the future, which is anticipated in terms of an expectation, is scattered among an infinity of temporal extensions.”63
The maps that follow are one way to imagine the expectation of readers in 1922. Better yet, they provide an opportunity to think about a “horizon of expectations,” as Hans Robert Jauss called it, one that places the emphasis less on the readers’ imagined connection with the novel and instead forces us to think about the readerly network of which it was a part. Though uninterested in the geography of reception history, Jauss was aware that there are “empirical means which had never been thought of before—literary data which give each work a specific attitude of the audience.”64 The geographical information about subscribers is such a dataset, but what’s more, it provides a unique perspective on the attitude of an audience whose coordinates have never been mapped before.
III
With the exception of Beach, no one else would have really known how far the distribution of Ulysses extended, but thanks to her notebooks, this information is part of an incomplete, occasionally inaccurate, but nevertheless valuable, geographical dataset that lets us do to the readers of 1922 what Ernst and his legal team did a decade later: map desire. By mapping desire, we are able to identify the routes of circulation, locations with the greatest density, and the inevitable dead spots, but in doing so, we can establish how this particular publication event had a rhythm, structure, and design that was very particular, bound as it was by a wide range of material and legal constraints but also whimsy, chance, and preference. Unable to go everywhere all at once, Ulysses was forced to move along specific channels, and it was a process shaped as much by the institutions involving bookdealers, agents, critics, and media outlets as it was by word of mouth and personal connections.
Mapping the desire for Ulysses, then, is not just an attempt to demystify what the first readers wanted when they wanted it (investment, knowledge, entertainment). Rather, it is part of a critical practice that lets us examine the degrees to which this desire was communicated across such a vast geographical expanse. Subscribing to Ulysses was as much about eventually getting a copy of the book as it was in becoming part of a community of readers and institutions that wanted the same thing at the same time in different places. Ulysses never made its own exclusivity a secret. In fact, that was what motivated enough readers to pay up sight unseen. By breaking this geographical information down even further it becomes possible to measure the desire at different scales and in doing so compare the effects of not only proximity and distance but also the nationally defined formations of country, city, and region across different continents. The goal is not just to identify who did and did not read Ulysses. It is to locate that desire not only across Paris, London, and New York but also the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe and, in doing so, make explicit a dynamic process involving the desire for something that was as much symbolic as it was real, the words in Ulysses still unknown and the deluge of critical interpretations so familiar to us today not yet unleashed.
Paris, the hub of the entire enterprise, is the most logical place to start. As copies arrived in February and March, they were being shipped out from Beach’s bookshop on 12 rue de l’Odéon, but they were also getting picked up or delivered locally to 118 documented subscribers (totaling 254 copies), some of them reserved for the wandering expats and holiday travelers passing through. The “good many” Parisian subscribers praised by Beach were later singled out by Monnier for their intense loyalty and support, but neither of them could have known that these subscribers actually comprised one-quarter of the total number, with London coming in at ninety-two, before dropping off precipitously to the twenty-nine in New York City (figure 4.5).65
One hundred and eighteen is the number of Parisian subscribers that can be positively identified, but it was certainly higher. Monnier, for instance, was also distributing an unknown number of copies at an increased price in Paris through La Maison des Amis des Livres.66 In addition, there were the local expats, mostly American and British, who were buying copies to deliver elsewhere—some but not all filling out subscription forms once actual copies started arriving in Beach’s shop. And we can’t forget the case of a single subscription that came in from the group of “poor artists from Montparnasse” (three total) who saved what few francs they could by staying in bed to consume less food.67 The identities of these starving artists remain unknown, but their presence somewhere in the list reminds us that one private copy could, in fact, sustain many through a pass-along readership.
London had fewer subscribers than Paris, but it actually purchased significantly more copies: 341 (including the thirty-six of Weaver) to 254 (figure 4.6). This discrepancy between the quantity of readers and copies reveals the degree to which mediated subscriptions dominated the reception process. Out of 786 or so trackable copies, 436 went to booksellers around the world (494 if we include publishers, agents, and libraries). In London alone, more than 220 of them went to twenty-two different bookstores (if we include the copies without complete information), the largest single order belonging to William Jackson (eighty-seven copies), but the average bulk order was closer to ten.68 The dominance of bookstore subscriptions over private ones indicates that there was more speculation in this city than anywhere else. Indeed, a percentage of the London booksellers would complete the transaction for clients, but they were also generating stock for future customers who had not yet subscribed.
Lawrence Rainey claims that Beach and Weaver had very different ideas about the role that would be played by these London booksellers (and English readers in general), the former catering to a market of limited editions, the latter to the general public. It is largely with the participation of these booksellers that Rainey locates a modernist divide, the one separating general readers from a group of newly emerging patron-investors interested in experimental literature. “The reason to buy a book published by Weaver,” Rainey argues, “was to read it; the reason for buying the edition proposed by Beach was quite different—to be able to sell it again perhaps at a significant profit if all went well.”69 There were certainly booksellers and agents ready to capitalize on the scarcity, but as Edward Bishop argues, Rainey’s conclusions are blown way out of proportion and not supported by auction records or the fact that cheaper editions sold out long before the more expensive, but certainly more collectible, signed ones. Beach, he claims to the contrary, wanted a readers’ edition even if she was caught up in a publishing strategy that treated books as investments.70 A Ulysses printed for readers, then, but one in which the transaction itself was also executed by agents and booksellers. If we exclude those eighty-seven copies that went to William Jackson, the London orders were modest, which also reveals the degree to which the desire to invest was limited. But even if we assume that a large portion were advanced orders, that means the number itself was extremely low—a few copies here and there, and definitely nothing that would indicate any single bookseller was expecting a windfall (certainly not the kind described by Beach when she had to remove one of the first copies from the window fearing that it would be stolen).71
More subscribers in Paris, more copies going to London, and then there’s New York City (figure 4.7).72 When it was serialized, Margaret Anderson claimed that the appreciation came from the “far west” but noticed that “New York was particularly cold.”73 Not much had changed once the book was out. Twenty-nine readers purchased 107 copies, half of them went to three different individuals, three of them for booksellers (fifteen to John Quinn, eighteen to Marion Peter, twenty-five to Egmont Arens). This isn’t the first time that the numbers in New York City were lower than expected. Remember the 250,000 readers Joyce thought he lost by 1927 as a result of Roth’s pirated edition followed by the 12,000 actual copies printed by Random House in 1934? The American audience, in general, may have been difficult to gauge, but the one in New York City proved to be even more so.
Ernst’s numbers from the New York State librarians and booksellers are useful in this regard: seventeen out of twenty four librarians indicated that there was “some demand” for Ulysses, but only two were willing to concede “much demand.”74 If these librarians are to be trusted at all, then the demand for Ulysses in New York State was fairly modest. A number of different factors would have influenced the public’s opinion in 1922, but it’s worth considering the possibility that Ulysses just wasn’t as widely desirable as the literary histories, many of them motivated by anecdotal evidence and fantasies about a cataclysmic literary event, might want us to imagine. The wider circulation of excerpts in the Little Review could have been one reason (followed by a two-year delay when serialization stopped), but there’s the added fact that the intellectual orbit, the same one that advertised and promoted the novel in Paris and London, was not as substantial on the other side of the Atlantic, and it didn’t help that so many of American expats were still located overseas.
But if New York City is surprisingly low, Dublin is high (figure 4.8).75 Beach recalls that Joyce was particularly keen to have “all Irish notices” sent out as soon as the copies were available. The result was sixteen different subscribers making up the forty-two copies, not so far off, in fact, from Richard Rowan’s calculation of his own book sales in Exiles. “Thirty-seven copies have now been sold in Dublin.”76 In this case, one donated (National Library of Ireland), ten sold (or gifted) to private individuals, and the rest to bookstores (thirty-one copies divided between four of them).77 Given such a high number of bookseller copies, it is possible that many of Joyce’s countrymen preferred to keep their identities hidden (as he suspected), but we should also not lose sight of the fact that Dublin was still higher on the list than the more than thirty other towns and cities, including Trieste and Zurich, the other two places he included in his address to the reader on the last page. Unable to identify any of the actual names could only have fueled his sense of betrayal, and it was no doubt corroborated by the first Irish review labeling Ulysses “the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature.”78 It seems fitting that Oliver St. John Gogarty, one of the few Dubliners Joyce actually included on his original wish list, failed to buy a copy. But why, it’s worth asking, would he need to become a reader of the novel given the fact that he was already immortalized in the novel?
The reception history of Ulysses is really a tale of three cities. London, Paris, and New York purchased 699 copies while the rest were distributed in quantities of one or two to lone subscribers in all the others. But while this data may reveal the exclusively metropolitan nature of Joyce’s readership, it also confirms the importance of the local place and population on its original reception. Had Ulysses been published in an English-speaking country, Paris would not have been as prominent on the list. But that simple fact tells us something about the way the bookshop, the promotional events, the newspaper blasts, the locals, and even the tourists, all contributed to the configuration of that first audience in fundamental ways. Ulysses, then, was set in Dublin and directed to an audience of English speakers in London and New York City, but the support of a Parisian readership helped ensure that the printing bill got paid, especially in those early months when the novel was still unprinted and unreviewed.
But what can these numbers tell us at the scale of the country? If we move outward from New York City across the United States, for instance, the distribution gets incredibly sparse—most of the subscription activity was concentrated in the Northeast, and with the exception of two copies shipped to Los Angeles and New Mexico (Yvor Winters), pretty much stopping at Chicago with Sherwood Anderson (to the West) and Virginia (to the South). If you combine the rest of the U.S. subscriptions with the ones I’ve already mentioned for New York City, that makes 153 total, which is still half of the number of copies in London (figure 4.9). Granted, of course, that more copies were entering the United States from citizens traveling abroad (and through export agents such as William Jackson, based in the UK), but this approximate quantity is still on the low end given the size of the country and its population. There is always the possibility of a general lack of interest, readerly apathy, and the absence of promotional material, but it’s also very likely that the subscription forms were just not easy to obtain, especially for those living far from urban centers.
The four thousand prospectuses Darantière printed for the first edition were not enough to blanket any city, country, or region. So even at this early stage in the process, the rules for gauging readerly interest were not only highly personalized (depending on who you knew), they were also incredibly random (McAlmon getting people to sign up on the streets of Paris, for instance). As a point of reference, consider how many U.S. readers on Beach’s original wish list actually ended up subscribing (44 out of 199).79 Again, French readers took the lead with the total number of copies (103 out of 218), most of them in Paris. Still, she managed to enlist 213 subscribers, at least following the names on this list, which is roughly 20 percent of the total number of copies printed (figure 4.10).
The evidence here proves that this was not a random group of book lovers where access was open to everyone. Rather, it was a more close-knit network made up largely of individuals with personal connections either to the publisher or her coterie of local supporters. Ulysses may have generated some attention in the American Press but it was after the publication, and news about procuring copies beforehand was difficult to come by. The absence of randomness in this reception history, in fact, is not a minor point. It is part of the structural logic behind the formation of this first audience. Readers were not accidentally found: they were designated either by word of mouth or through the more deliberate circulation of promotional material. And at this particular moment in the history of publishing, that meant large portions of the public would simply not have had any access to the consumption process.
Which, of course, takes us back to the question with which I began this chapter: Who read Ulysses? It’s not something we can answer by compiling lively biographical sketches of individual subscribers and publishing statistics or developing sociological or economic theories regarding the production/consumption of literary works. Rather, it also requires thinking about reception as a quantitative problem, one that gets reflected in the geographical distribution at a particular moment in time. In this case, the geography of subscribers in the United States tells us how Ulysses was and was not moving in the world. This movement is not just one isolated factor in its reception: it lets us access the readerships at different scales (city, country, globe) to identify, as much as possible, why the routes of circulation were open in some directions and not others. Finding a large majority of U.S. readers congregating in the Northeastern part of the United States, then, might come as no surprise, but it should inform how we understand the numbers later not just with a document such as Ernst’s map but also with the first American print run. In 1922, Ulysses belonged to an elite, urban cluster, one whose exclusivity, no doubt increased the longer copies were kept out of America.
A separate ban on Ulysses was issued in the United Kingdom as well, but that didn’t stop England, Scotland, Wales, and one bookshop in Northern Ireland from assembling the greatest concentration of copies: 441. That may come as no surprise when you already know in advance that London had the highest number of subscriptions (341) but that leaves one hundred more, twenty-one of them going to bookstores and the rest to private individuals (figure 4.11). If we can’t attribute the increase to the ban (just as we can’t blame the decrease on the ban in the United States), then what’s to account for the significant difference between the number of subscribers in the U.S. and UK?
There are a few factors to bear in mind: with the exception of four incomplete episodes in the Egoist, the serialization of Ulysses in England had failed; there was publicity already generated by Weaver for an edition through the Egoist Press before she stepped aside to let Beach take over; news about the arrival of Ulysses was appearing in the British Press, including the review by Sisley Huddleston, which resulted in the largest subscription spike on a single day (136, see figure 4.2); and there was a long-established network of 30 booksellers working across the English Channel, the same ones who purchased roughly 246 copies for distribution to private individuals. Booksellers were not willing to lose money in this transaction, so in mediating between Beach and these unknown readers, they provided a pretty accurate account of the demand that existed during that period.
In Paris, Ulysses was very local affair tracked by “the daily bulletins in the press,” but the enthusiasm did not spread across France.80 Only twenty copies were intended for destinations outside of Paris (figure 4.12). When read against the results of the other countries, this data make it hard to ignore that the actual location of its publication actively shaped the geographical diversity of its audience. The Parisian pedigree of Ulysses was one of the reasons it was so prominently on display there in the press, in the various intellectual circles, through Beach and Monnier, by chatter among fellow writers, etc. And if before I asked how many Ulysses subscribers in Paris would have been had it been published in America or England, now it’s just as fitting to ask where it might have gone.
There is no doubt that proximity of the publisher affected the degree of interest in the audience, but, in this case, it also proves just how the scope and scale of the geography was very much in and of its time. Looking at Ulysses as a geographic information system (GIS) reveals that it could only have been published from Paris during these months in 1922. It’s one of the great ironies (or insults) that the 1934 Random House edition failed to include this place and date on its copyright notice, effectively suggesting Ulysses was in the public domain since it had not been printed in the United States six months after publication in Paris. However, doing so promoted the book’s status as a “modern classic” with no obvious origin, unintentionally making it as timeless and placeless as the epic upon which it is based.81
But what about the rest of the world? Forty-five copies of Ulysses went to thirteen other countries, and that quantity, which made up less than 5 percent of the total published, was enough for Beach to imagine that Ulysses was a global phenomenon. The numbers, however, just don’t add up. The presence of a single copy in two different countries or two copies each in seven more may establish that a subscriber was present, but just as the missing subscription of Shaw does not extend to all of Ireland, the reverse is also true: a single subscription does not a country or city, or continent of readers make.
These singular subscriptions are outliers in a distribution system organized around three central nodes, but Beach’s wish list, which included the addresses where she would send prospectuses, reveal that it was largely her doing. She was the one who stirred up interest in these far-off places. In the process of locating readers, she didn’t just meet the quota, she also generated a degree of geographical diversity that the reception history of Ulysses would have otherwise lacked. These outliers belong to a highly personalized network that would, of course, include the recommendations of others, but is not, as I mentioned before, open to a process of random selection for subscribers.
Which is one of the reasons that even now, GIS Joyce is as much about generating data involved with the geographical distribution as it is about accessing an imaginative construction heavily influenced by the one person responsible for getting it out into the world in the first place. In 1922, the process of finding a local audience of the fit and few may have been hard but getting it to the fit and even fewer in countries so far away was even harder. If Ulysses became global on a small scale at this moment it was because Beach made it so. Looking at these numbers, it can be tempting to launch into general conclusions about modernist book history or the use of computational methods in literary reception but only if we are also willing to account for the ineffable desire of publishers, authors, readers, and even critics for an object they didn’t have in their possession.
They wanted Ulysses without realizing it was Ulysses who wanted them. None of this would have worked if subscribers weren’t around waiting to be counted. As much as they were acquiring an object for consumption, investment, or edification (or all of the above), they were making the number of that first audience concrete. One thousand was an embodied quantity, something that started out as the more abstract expression of an audience that could be imagined while also anticipating one that would be unimaginable in the future. That process of naming, knowing, and counting subscribers is not only what made this entire experience unique in 1922 but also unrepeatable as the history of this novel’s reception unfolded. Never again would novelist, publisher, and audience be triangulated in this way, each angle representing a complex exchange of wanting but also of being wanted.
After the first printing, Joyce never needed to know if copies sold or where they went. But the same is true for all the readers left to buy later editions: from that point forward, they were less numbers and names corresponding with copies than they were the percentages on the profits from copies sold. And it was this subsequent acceleration that made Ulysses a bestseller in the 1930s, proving, finally, that this first number was as much symbolic as it was concrete, the 1 and 3 zeros representing not the final quantity of copies sold but the quantity that could be sold once Ulysses was allowed to wander freely across the world.
IV
“Where?” It’s the final question in episode 17 followed by the last “word,” which takes the form of an enlarged em dash. Richard Ellmann has suggested that this isn’t just any piece of punctuation: it represents planet Earth as seen from “interstellar space” signaling to readers that Stephen and Bloom have been transformed into heavenly bodies.82 But what Joyce did to his characters at the end of his novel is what we can continue to do as critics when we ask the same question about his first readers: Where? The pursuit of an answer, however, will not lead us to eternity and the stars above even if the final number of copies, approximately 1,022, recalls the 1,022 fixed stars of Ptolemy (adapted from the star catalogue of Hipparchus) that Dante references in Il Convivio.83 In fact, as the maps scattered throughout this chapter attest, it is a process that requires throwing ourselves back into the presentness of the past as much as possible to recuperate some of the complexity of this fleeting interaction between author, publisher, reader, and world that was very much in and of its time but also in and of its number. For the briefest of moments, Joyce knew his readers, they were part of a countable community that could be known, and it didn’t matter what any of them actually thought of the novel or if they even read it at all.
By counting subscribers, we arrive at the realization that readerly desire can have an address and a number. It is a desire as evident in the wish lists and questionnaires as it is in the notebooks, address books, ledgers, prospectuses, legal briefs, maps, and even on the last page of the novel itself. As with all of the other chapters in this book, though, the numbers alone are not the answer. In fact, it is the precise and approximate quantities that help us to generate new questions not only about where it went but also what it is made of. This quantity of one thousand will seem small for data-minded distant readers. Yet, working at such a reduced scale expands the significance of a number that has lost its potential to generate any sense of wonder. But for those who don’t think the numbers mean anything, remember it was copy one thousand that Joyce inscribed to Nora, even if she was never actually part of that first group of “ten men or women out of a hundred” who actually read it through.84 Still, the act of giving this particular copy was a symbolic affirmation between husband and wife, similar, in fact, to Molly Bloom’s “Yes,” but it also signified the end of a cycle that began so many years earlier. A century later and Ulysses seems as if it’s everywhere, the copies now printed innumerable. But this was the edition from which all the others derived, and it was part of a publishing event that generated a unique assemblage of reader/subscribers who would discover in the front matter that the novel was “LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES” pages even before reading the first line.
Any attempt to number, name, and locate these readers now, to trace the outlines of that horizon of expectations, brings us face to face with our own position on an ever-expanding list. “For the literary historian must first become a reader again himself,” Jauss once claimed, “before he can understand and classify a work.”85 This task of becoming a reader again was as true in 1972 for Jauss as it is in 2022 with the centennial of the novel’s publication as it will be again in 2222, the perfect year for Ulysses if there ever was one. And while critics can keep adding zeros to that original tally over time, they won’t ever change the number of its first reception. One thousand was there from the start and looking at it distributed across a map of the cities, countries, and continents makes it impossible to ignore that Ulysses was never separate from the geography of its first readers. They were as encoded in the order and design as the 732 pages, the 264,448 words, the 3,342 paragraphs, the 592 characters present, and the 7 years of composition, which I will address in the next chapter. The trick, as always, involves knowing where to look for the numbers and then figuring out how to count them and why.