James Joyce's Leopold gets his own book for Bloomsday

James Joyce's Leopold gets his own book for Bloomsday

BIOGRAPHY

After bringing Ulysses to Twitter in recent years, this year's celebration will see the novel's hero get a book to himself

Reprint the legend ... a preview image of The Works of Master Poldy

"… well hes beyond everything I declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if I only could remember the half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master Poldy yes'"

This fragment of Molly Bloom's great soliloquy at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses – alluding to her husband and the novel's hero Leopold – has lain there for 90 years, just waiting for some enterprising editor to take on Mrs Bloom's memory test and produce a volume of the thoughts of Joyce's Everyman. Of course, for most of that time, the jealous guardianship of the Joyce Estate had ensured that nobody could or would do any such thing, but now that the novel is in the public domain it was only a matter of time before someone decided to give it a shot. And now they have.

The Liberate Ulysses collaborative, consisting of Dubliner Jamie Murphy and Steve Cole from Baltimore, Maryland, have been marking Bloomsday online for the past two years with what they call a "global multimedia celebration". They started in 2011 with Ulysses Meets Twitter – a project spread over 24 hours with 44 people tweeting favourite bits of Joyce's masterpiece. Last year they organised a bigger, better Twitterfest and published a set of video dialogues designed to get Joyce lovers everywhere talking about the book.

So when it emerged that they planned to mark Bloomsday 2013 by publishing "The works of Master Poldy", fans might assume they were going to Tweet Mr Bloom's wisdom to the world, or maybe produce a quick ebook. The reality is a bit more surprising than that. It turns out that Murphy is a fine letterpress printer whose Salvage Press specialises in broadsides and artists' books, and the plan is to produce Molly's imagined volume as in hand-printed letterpress in a limited edition using a mix of metal and wooden types.

The Works of Master Poldy will be produced entirely by hand in Dublin to mark this year's annual Joyce celebration in June. This is the kind of publishing that the digital age is supposed to have rendered obsolete. In fact, this is the kind of publishing that offset printing was supposed to have killed off years ago. It seems that LiberateUlysses really intend the multimedia bit in their tagline to be genuinely multi. To compliment this very traditional bit of publishing, they have been running an ongoing Twitter campaign of pre-publicity for the book. They're also engaging in that most 21st-century activity, crowdfunding. This is analogue and digital in perfect accord.

As a fan of the novel, I have some reservations about the idea of mining Ulysses as a source of aphorisms. There is a precedent of sorts in Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece, a self-help volume based on Joyce's celebration of the pleasures of the everyday. The chief difference is that Kiberd interprets, whereas Mr Poldy will give us the master's own words. What's more, LiberateUlysses can claim some kind of legitimacy on the grounds that they are finally making Molly Bloom's dream come true.

In the ongoing debate on the survival of the paper book, this project exemplifies one possible model for the future. There's something about a well-made physical object with good design, quality materials and fine printing that no digital substitute can match, and the power of the internet to help publishers find funding and markets can be harnessed to make fine editions viable. Ebooks may well win the mass market, but as long as there are people who appreciate the printer's craft, paper books are not going to go away.

The Guardian

Bloomsday quiz: how well do you know your Joyce?

Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses, is a fine day to remind yourself of his genius. Test your knowledge with our 16 questions for 16 June

• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 June 2011 08.00 BST

Statue of James Joyce at Fluntern cemetery, Zurich. Photograph: Sebastian Derungs/Reuters

1. 1.What was the significance of 16 June?
   1. It was the day on which Dubliners was finally accepted for publication
   2. It was the date of his confirmation
   3. It was the day of Joyce's first date with his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle
   4. It was his birthday
2. 2.Which playwright did Joyce hero-worship?
   1. Ben Jonson
   2. Henrik Ibsen
   3. George Bernard Shaw
   4. George Buchner
3. 3.Which of the following is not a quote from Joyce?
   1. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
   2. Paternity is a legal fiction.
   3. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
   4. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
4. 4.What did Joyce refer to as "electricity" and "beefsteak"?
   1. Dante and Chaucer
   2. Ireland and Italy
   3. Woman and man
   4. White and red wine
5. 5.The framework of Finnegans Wake is based on a cyclical theory of history borrowed from which thinker?
   1. Friedrich Nietzsche
   2. Giambattista Vico
   3. Homer
   4. Arthur Schopenhauer
6. 6.Joyce is often accused of being verbose and obscure. Yet which work did he claim to have written "in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard"?
   1. Dubliners
   2. Exiles
   3. Chamber Music
   4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
7. 7.When was the English ban on Ulysses lifted?
   1. 1924
   2. 1936
   3. 1945
   4. 1963
8. 8.Which author admired Joyce so much that he not only worked as his secretary but is said to have crippled his much larger feet by wearing identical shoes?
   1. WH Auden
   2. Samuel Beckett
   3. TS Eliot
   4. Christopher Isherwood
9. 9.Which novel did Joyce call "the English Ulysses"?
   1. Robinson Crusoe
   2. Clarissa
   3. Vanity Fair
   4. Dombey & Son
10. 10.Who was brave or foolhardy enough to edit Finnegans Wake down into a shorter edition?
    1. David Lodge
    2. Anthony Burgess
    3. Alain de Botton
    4. Bono from U2
11. 11.In the Homeric parallels of Ulysses, which character is Telemachus to Bloom's Ulysses?
    1. Stephen Dedalus
    2. Buck Mulligan
    3. Stephen Hero
    4. Blazes Boylan
12. 12.Joyce died less than two years after publishing his mammoth “night-language” dream-text, Finnegans Wake. What were his hints about his next project?
    1. That it would make Finnegans Wake look easy
    2. That it would be a children's book
    3. That it would be short, simple and a novel of reawakening
    4. That it would do for Trieste what Ulysses did for Dublin
13. 13.What is the final word in Ulysses?
    1. Love
    2. Sex
    3. Death
    4. Yes
14. 14."The only demand I make of my reader," Joyce once told an interviewer, is that ...
    1. "He knows how to drink and make love as well as read."
    2. "He finishes them."
    3. "He should devote his whole life to reading my works."
    4. "He acknowledge my genius, even though he will never understand it."
15. 15.The last word in Finnegans Wake is
    1. No
    2. Jaysus
    3. Morning!
    4. The
16. 16."I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?" Whose critical verdict?
    1. Nora Joyce
    2. The Queen Mother
    3. Val Doonican
    4. TS Eliot
       The Guardian
        

       10 James Joyce Facts in Honor of Bloomsday

       Happy Bloomsday!! If you're not a James Joyce aficionado (or if you don't celebrate obscure holidays), June 16 is the day all of the events in Joyce's Ulysses take place. The name comes from Leopold Bloom, the main character in the novel. To honor Bloomsday and James Joyce, here are a few fun facts about one of Ireland's (and the world's) most beloved authors.

       1. Why June 16? Of all the days in the year, you have to wonder why Joyce chose that exact date for Ulysses to take place. Well, the answer is actually pretty simple: it's that day in 1904 when he had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

       2. He and Nora had quite the passionate love affair, as evidenced by the many erotic letters they wrote one another and saved for posterity. One of the letters sold for nearly half a million dollars at Sotheby's in 2004. Here's a sample of Joyce's writing for you - and this is one of the tamer bits: "The two parts of your body which do dirty things are the loveliest to me."

       3. Together, Joyce and Barnacle had two children (and at least one miscarriage). Although we don't know much about Giorgio Joyce, we know quite a bit about Lucia Joyce, who was a pretty fascinating person. She studied ballet with Isadora Duncan, dated Joyce's contemporary Samuel Beckett, was declared schizophrenic, and was a patient of Carl Jung's. Most Joyce scholars believe Lucia was the muse for Finnegans Wake. It was Jung's belief that both Lucia and James suffered from schizophrenia and said the two of them were both headed to the bottom of a river, but James was diving headlong into it and Lucia was falling against her will.

       4. Joyce had a couple of pretty serious phobias.

       His cynophobia (fear of dogs) stemmed from an attack by a neighborhood dog when he was just five years old. And his keraunophobia, fear of thunder and lightning, formed when his religious aunt told him that thunder was an angry God sounding his wrath at humans.

       5. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married on June 16th in honor of Bloomsday.

       6. It may be hard to believe, but the word "quark" first appeared in James Joyce'sFinnegans Wake. Scientist Murray Gell-Mann had been thinking about calling the unit "kwork," but when he found the invented word in the Joyce classic, he knew he had discovered the spelling he wanted to use. Here's what he had to say about it:

       "In 1963, when I assigned the name 'quark' to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "˜kwork.' Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word 'quark' in the phrase 'Three quarks for Muster Mark.' Since "˜quark' (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "˜Mark,' as well as "˜bark' and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "˜kwork.' But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the 'portmanteau' words in Through the Looking-Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "˜Three quarks for Muster Mark' might be 'Three quarts for Mister Mark,' in which case the pronunciation "˜kwork' would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

       7. Joyce may have had the gift of writing, but he certainly didn't have the gift of gab.When he met Marcel Proust in 1922 at a dinner party, the rest of the party-goers listened anxiously to what the two literary geniuses would chat about. The eavesdroppers were likely disappointed, as Proust and Joyce spent the entire conversation talking about their ailments—Joyce had constant headaches and eye trouble; Proust's stomach was giving him troubles. Then they both admitted neither of them had read the other's works. As the story goes, they shared a cab on the way home and Proust scampered out of the cab without paying his half of the fare.

       8. More evidence that Joyce didn't get along with his fellow writers too well: William Butler Yeats desperately wanted Joyce to like him and offered to read his poetry. Joyce rolled his eyes and replied, "I do so since you ask me, but I attach no more importance to your opinion than to anybody one meets in the streets." Ouch.

       9. Joyce had earlier considered titling another book Ulysses in Dublin. He ended up calling it Dubliners instead.

       10. His final words are said to have been, "Does nobody understand?" He died on January 10, 1941.

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       BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES JOYCE