According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most accurate edition published. As each subsequent edition attempted to correct these mistakes, it incorporated more of its own.
(Wikipedia entry for Ulysses)
11.24 Fixing a defect has a substantial (20 to 50 percent) chance of introducing another.
(Fred Brooks: The Mythical Man-Month)
Trying to correct the text of Ulysses must be akin to trying to debug a very complex program, poorly documented, whose original author has left the company (the company of the living, in Joyce's case) and is unavailable for questioning.
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