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This copy of the eleventh printing of James Joyce's Ulysses was
imported by Random House and seized as pornographic by United States Customs in
New York on May 8, 1933. The District Attorney marked the objectionable
passages, such as the heavily marked pages in the Ithaca episode, to prepare the
government's case for use in the now famous court proceedings. In his decision,
made on December 6, 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey recognized that the intent of
the work was not pornographic, and that the test for obscenity could not be the
presence of isolated obscene passages, but the effect of the work in its
entirety. The result of the decision was to permit Random House to publish
Ulysses, on January 25, 1934, without legal risks; and the long range
consequence was the eventual publication in the United States of other
controversial works by authors such as D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller.
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