Usylessly, edition two, 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 aim of this second edition is to make the essays available again. Unlike edition one, edition two does not recreate the form of James Joyce’s 1922 Shakespeare & Co. edition.

The book contains two essays written 27 years apart by Edward L. Bishop and an additional visual essay by John Morgan. 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 in Usylessly, edition one, for the first time, starts its journey in the archive of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas with over 40 copies of the 1922 edition and follows Morgan and Bishop on the quest for the blue cover. The visual essay, ‘Kind of Blue’ by John Morgan, gathers together a number of images related to Ulysses and to the colour blue

Usylessly, edition two

Edward L. Bishop, John Morgan
Ten Thousand Angels Press, 2025

240 × 195 mm, 120pp; English
ISBN 978-1-0682940-0-6

Edition of 2000, each numbered