Somewhere, James Joyce and Sylvia Beach are smiling. The Guardian reports that a rare first edition of Joyce's Ulysses sold Thursday for £275,000 (nearly $450,000), the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.

The book was remarkably well-preserved, according to the news report -- mainly because the original owner only read the last part, which contained the sexy innuendo that led authorities to ban it in the U.S. and other countries.

I can only wonder about that owner. Was he/she a daring reader (probably)? A legal scholar researching the First Amendment (doubt it)? The book itself might not have been published without the intervention of Beach, a Baltimore-born woman who opened a Paris bookshop called Shakespeare & Co. between the wars.

She became a one-woman support group for Hemingway, Joyce and other talented writers who populated the city. And when none of the big publishing houses would touch the salacious Ulysses, she published it. p.s. I love the Guardian's cheeky prose. In a previous article about Joyce, the paper states: "The novel, first published in Paris on February 2 1922, in the teeth of a threatened prosecution for obscenity, is regarded as one of the most influential, and most half-read, of the 20th century."