Heaven love dear old James Joyce. The Irish writer, dead now these 72 years, continues to inspire artistic endeavors, especially around June 16th – aka “Bloomsday” – a date of significance in his most famous work, “Ulysses.”
Two years ago, NASA publicist Steve Cole Tweeted that book in its entirety. This year, he and Dublin letterpress printer Jamie Murphy transformed a $10,000 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign into an intricately designed and letterpressed book of quotes from Leopold Bloom, that book’s main character.
The initial 120-hardback-copy run of “The Works of Master Poldy” (the title itself derived from a “Ulysses” quote) features those quotations in different sizes, colors and orientations in “a mix of traditional monotype methods and handset antique wooden type.”
“Each group of Bloom’s fragments is arranged in a poem-like stream on one page while facing it on the other page is that evocative phrase set in a very experimental typographic design,” Cole told The Globe and Mail. “I wanted to see how typography could be used to communicate something extra about Bloom’s words and his world, something we don’t expect from books in general – and something e-books and Kindle can’t hope to deliver.”
A mass market edition will be available later; the limited edition version sells for $310 each.
