June 16, 1904. A young Irish writer takes a waitress out on a date. She knocks his socks off, resulting in a passionate marriage and the most famous novel written in the 20th century. James Joyce’s Ulysses is, among many other things, a valentine to Nora Barnacle, the Galway girl who became Mrs. Joyce.

June 16, 1904. Stephen Daedalus stands next to "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" looking out over the "snotgreen sea." Meanwhile, across Dublin, Leopold Bloom makes toast and tea for Molly.

The novel follows these characters through an ordinary day in Dublin, ending with a cup of cocoa in the Blooms' kitchen late at night. If this sounds surprisingly plain for this fanciest of novels, that impression is both true and misleading. Based on Homer's Odyssey, Joyce created a prose epic of immense difficulty and intellectuality, but it is also supremely human. Every time I teach the book, my students start out puzzled, continue fascinated and wind up falling in love with the whole huge enterprise.

The Philadelphia connection with Ulysses is a unique one: The Rosenbach Museum & Library owns the manuscript. (Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach bought it in 1924 for $1,975.) The manuscript is one of the jewels in a crowded crown, along with other gaspable items, including the Blake painting The Number of the Beast Is 666, a first edition of Don Quixote, several Dickens manuscripts, 4,000 drawings by Maurice Sendak and the Marianne Moore Archive, among the many, many significant holdings.

Because the museum is in the midst of renovations, the "Ulysses in Hand" exhibit is located in a townhouse next door to the double brownstone owned by the Rosenbach brothers (we are talking major real estate); one brother collected literary artifacts, the other historic and art objets.

"Ulysses in Hand" is a small and fascinating exhibition, curated by the very knowledgeable Michael J. Barsanti, focusing on the process by which a legendary novel comes into being, with manuscript pages on display, accompanied by typescripts filled with corrections, insertions and deletions. There are letters and postcards from Joyce (don't miss the early one that he signs "Stephen Daedalus"). They have assembled letters and photos from all over the country to enrich the portrait of the novel's creative existence. There is lots of information on the walls and docents available on request; if you're lucky, Barsanti will stop in and give you a tour.

In addition, there is a lovely assortment of other activities related to the exhibition:

Starting May 30-June 1 and continuing June 6-8, there will be a cabaret created by Philadelphia impresario and director Greg Giovanni, featuring music from this very music-filled novel (especially the "Sirens" episode, with two singers as "Bronze" and "Gold"). Giovanni has been researching this like mad, so we can expect both entertainment and authenticity. Guinness ("for the strength that's in it") will, of course, be served.

On June 14-15, 21-22, 28-29, walking tours starting from the Rosenbach will take a "Wandering Rocks" approach to Philadelphia, as if it were 1904. The tour guides are graduate students who created a company called Poor Richard's Walking Tours. They promise both rigorous historical information and performance art on the hoof (pun intended, Joyceans).

On June 15 (11 a.m. and 2 p.m.), a show for children called "The Potable Joyce" uses shadow puppets and an actor to show how Joyce's love of The Odyssey when he was a boy led to the Great Work. This "work in progress" is by Sebastienne Mundheim, who has created many museum-based shows for both children and adults.

There has also been a series of free Thursday night lectures (7 p.m.); the last one is May 23.

And, on Wednesday evenings in June, a course called "A Few Words from Our Sponsors," taught by Barsanti, will discuss the contributions by Ezra Pound, John Quinn, Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver to the making and editing and publishing of the novel (which was famously rejected by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's press, and later banned).

And, if you want another Joycean event, the Arden Theatre's last show of the season, The Dead, is based on Joyce's story of the same name, the last in his early collection called Dubliners (recommendation: read it first). The Dead runs through that all-important date, June 16 (40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122).

June 16 -- any year. The annual Bloomsday celebration (noon to 7 p.m.) always features a public reading of portions of the novel by local luminaries on the steps of the Rosenbach. The street is closed to traffic, and the faithful as well as the curious gather.

As someone recently remarked, Joyceans are like Trekkies. This was after I'd confessed to doing the Ulysses pilgrimage through Dublin, which includes following Stephen's footsteps from the Martello Tower on the beach to the Library. I have snapshots of Eccles Street and of Nora's house in Galway. And once I bought a lemon soap at the apothecary shop where Bloom did -- it still exists. And I had lunch at Davy Byrne's Pub, where one merely has to order "the usual" on June 16: a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy -- Bloom's lunch in the novel. I even own an old and empty, slightly cracked crock of Plumtree's Potted Meat.

The Rosenbach Museum is beaming us Joyceans up with a little festival of literary and scholarly fun. Worth a look, even if you're not a card-carrying Bloomite.

“Ulysses in Hand,” Rosenbach Museum & Library, 2008 Delancey Place, 215-732-1600, www.rosenbach.org.