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 LiberateUlysses 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.
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 LiberateUlysses 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment