Usylessly - a project by John Morgan

John Morgan Studio 2021 ISBN 9781916878600 Acqn 31987

Hb 20x24cm 736pp col ills £55

Usylessly, a work by John Morgan, is the result of a close observation of the blue cover and form
of the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. The book duplicates the size, bulk and appearance
of the 1922 Shakespeare and Co. edition. Everything but the text. At the heart of the mostly blank
736 page book is a printed sixty-four page section containing two essays written twenty-seven
years apart by Edward L. Bishop and Ted Bishop. The first essay, 'Re-Covering Ulysses', was
initially published in Joyce Studies Annual in 1994 and explores the 'non-literary' aspects of the
book, charting, as Bishop explains, 'the movement of Ulysses the book - the physical object with
its various jackets, blurbs, ads and price tags - from modernist work to social document, to status
object, to cultural artefact to, finally, what seems to be a kind of futures commodity in the
freewheeling post-copyright market.' The second essay, 'Ulysses Blue', published here for the
first time, starts its journey in the archive of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas with over
forty copies of the 1922 edition and follows Morgan and Bishop on the quest for the blue cover,
which for Joyce had to be blue - "The colours of the binding (chosen by me) will be white letters
on a blue field - the Greek flag though really of Bavarian origin and imported with the dynasty. Yet
in a special way they symbolise the myth well - the white islands scattered over the sea." John
Morgan is the founder of John Morgan studio and Professor of design, typography and book art at
the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Ted Bishop is the author of Riding with Rilke: Reflections on
Motorcycles and Books, and The Social Life of Ink: Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with
the Written Word.

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