Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare & Co., 1926. Second Edition, First Printing. Pp xvi, 735. Publisher’s blue wrapper, titled in white on upper cover & on spine. Wrappers laid on to recent card covers, fraying to outer edges of prelimenary leaves, contetns pages generally in nice bright condition.

Between 1922 and 1925 the text of Ulysses was reprinted six times.  In May 1926 Shakespeare & Company issued a second edition in which the type was entirely reset and Joyce’s corrections from the previous printings were absorbed.

Joyce asked that the wrappers of Ulysses be printed in the Greek colours (white on a blue field), as he considered the colours lucky for him, and they also ‘suggested the myth of Greece and of Homer, the white island rising from the sea’ (Ellman, p.524). The precise shade caused the binders problems, and a sample was eventually mixed for their use by Joyce’s friend, the artist Myron Nutting.