There is continued controversy over public libraries banning Fifty Shades of Grey. On Bloomsday, Danielle Sigler at the Ransom Center library in Texas writes about another book that was censored on the charge of obscenity—James Joyce’s Ulysses. What did librarians think of the classic? Here are some of the Ransom Center's most treasured items in its Ulysses archives, including letters from librarians weighing in on the value of the book, most of them unfavorably. Pictured: an undated photo of editor and publisher Sylvia Beach and James Joyce.
Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center
Page proofs for the Harry Ransom Center's copy of Ulysses, 1922, before preservation and repair work.
Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center
The top priority was to maintain the subtle variations of color in the handwritten notations and corrections found in this text. The annotations of Joyce, editor and publisher Sylvia Beach, and printer Maurice Darantiere are the object of scholarly research, and these annotations were made to the individually issued page proofs before they were bound together. The adhesive used for the binding and the type of binding structure made it impossible to read some of the annotations.
Each leaf was deacidified with a nonaqueous solution of magnesium carbonate and then mended using Japanese paper. A custom housing that includes careful documentation of the original make-up of the gatherings was constructed to house the individual gatherings of the book.
Even though the original binding was intact, the Ulysses page proofs were disbound to reveal the annotations hidden in the gutter margin. The brittleness of the low-quality paper used for the proofs, with tears at the edges of every page, also justified this treatment.
Beach's ledger or subscription notebook that traces sales of private editions of Ulysses, which were limited to 1,000 copies sold exclusively by subscription. The notebook begins in 1921, before the book's publication, so some of the entries are for prepurchased copies. It runs until 1923. Beach, an American expatriate publisher and proprietor of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, published Ulysses in 1922. The Ransom Center has 37 copies of Beach's Ulysses, of the first edition of 1,000, of which four are signed copies of the limited first state of 100. The notebook is from the Ransom Center's Maurice Saillet Collection, which contains materials documenting Beach's bookshop, her activities as the first publisher of Ulysses, and her personal life.
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The Ransom Center holds the archive of Morris L. Ernst, who practiced law in New York for more than 60 years and was one of the leading advocates of civil liberties in 20th-century America. As counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, and later director emeritus, Ernst defended individual rights and freedoms in numerous landmark federal cases on privacy, libel, slander, obscenity, censorship, birth control, labor rights and monopolies. Ernst played a key role in the American publication of Ulysses. He also defended Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming. Pictured: As Ernst prepared for the 1933 trial of Ulysses, he asked Random House to distribute questionnaires about the novel to public and university libraries across the country. This chart records the responses by state.
Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center
The defense team for Ulysses mapped the locations of libraries reporting "any demand" for Joyce's book.
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Librarian Bella Steuernagel of Belleville, Illinois was not alone in her belief that Ulysses had "very emphatically ... no place in a public library."
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In this letter to Bennett Cerf at Random House, the head of Brooklyn's Public Library explained the plight of the library that "stock[s] something out of the ordinary."
Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center
Lillian M. Guinn's response from Bradley Polytechnic Institute in Peoria suggested that Ulysses would not be well received by its "open minded, clear & clean thinking" citizens.
Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center
Edward Bergin of the University of Detroit did not address the questions about Ulysses that were posed to him, but raised his voice in opposition to "the marketing of filth."
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Duke University's librarian J.P. Breedlove feared the influence of Ulysses on young people and argued for its restricted circulation.
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A number of librarians, including Rhoda W. Marshall at the Los Angeles Public Library, suspected that readers had only a prurient interest in Ulysses and were not reading the novel in its entirety.
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Fisk University's librarian, Louis Shores, was one of few librarians surveyed who believed that "no study of literary development in the 20th century can mean anything without Ulysses."
Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center
Librarians from Omaha, Amarillo, and Sioux Falls affirmed Ulysses's literary value even as some of their more cosmopolitan counterparts dismissed the work.
For more:
Danielle Sigler: How Fifty Shades of Grey Is Like Ulysses
Gordon Bowker: Literature's Most Tyrannical Estate Finally Loses Its Power
Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center
