By 1921, with the ban on Ulysses in America, and English printers refusing to print it, it seemed Ulysses would not be published for some time. Then, in March 1921, Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate who owned the bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris, offered to publish Ulysses. She engaged Maurice Darantiere to print the book, and in April he began to set the book in type. The process was slow and difficult, mainly because Joyce kept adding new material as he corrected the printer’s proof sheets, and a third of the book was added while it was being printed. The first Shakespeare and Company edition of just one thousand copies of Ulysses was published on Joyce’s fortieth birthday, 2 February 1922. This first edition was full of hundreds of mistakes that Joyce and the printer tried to correct in subsequent printings.
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