were on the receiving end, among them Alfred Knopf and Sherwood Anderson (if you're intrigued by this escapade, check out Michael Januska's novel Riverside Drive, it includes the smuggling of Ulysses into the States in its storyline). Beach's friends and subscribers throughout the U.S. The authorities were also pretty uptight about ‘immoral’ ‘pornographic’ literature, though this really wasn’t what the guards were on the lookout for.Each day, for what must have been several weeks on end, this innocent looking publishing salesman crossed the river, went to the Detroit Post Office and fired off first editions of what is now considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th Century. All sorts of people used to smuggle bottles of fine Canadian whisky across the border tucking them away in their trouser pants and underwear.

At the time, construction of the Ambassador Bridge had only just begun.These were in fact interesting times. This was the only way to cross the river back then. bookstore, were sent over from Paris.Every morning Braverman set off with a package under his arm (or somewhere less obvious) containing copies of Joyce’s novel (I’m guessing no more than one or two at a time), strolled downtown and somehow got past the border guards and onto the ferry. Once the smuggling plan was hatched, 40 copies of the novel, published by Sylvia Beach owner of the Shakespeare & Co. Braverman reportedly lived on Chatham Street in a house kitty-corner to the back of what is today The Windsor Star newspaper building.

The books were printed in Paris and mailed by Hemingway to a friend of his in Windsor who worked for the Curtis Publishing Company in Detroit.The friend, a reporter named Barney Braverman whom Hemingway had met during his days either in Toronto or Chicago (found references citing both), commuted from Detroit to Windsor each day on the ferry.

It crossed the Detroit River from 1884 to 1956, between Detroit and Windsor, OntarioThe first copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses to enter the U.S. Here's the back-story:The SS Lansdowne was a railroad car ferry built in 1884 by the Wyandotte Shipyard of the Detroit Dry Dock Company.

Listen here to our conversationWe talk, among other things, about the history of Shakespeare and Company, how Sylvia Beach started off, how James Joyce got Ulysses published, how the United States banned it, and how Ernest Hemingway figured out a way around this. I met with Krista Halverson, director of the newly founded Shakespeare and Company publishing house, at the famed bookstore in Paris.

Sylvia beach and ernest hemingway