This essay announces the project of a critical edition of Finnegans Wake, with an emended text and an apparatus, to be published by Oxford University Press in two volumes. As well as outlining its working principles, it provides a sample of the editorial apparatus for the first six pages of Finnegans Wake. In this apparatus we note our emendations and unresolved textual cruxes, and describe the processes which led to textual error or ‘transmissional departures’, as we call them.