MORGAN, John
Usylessly Edition Two

In 2021, John Morgan published Usylessly—the result of a close observation of the blue cover and form of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. At the heart of the mostly blank 736 page book were 2 essays written 27 years apart by Edward L. Bishop and Ted Bishop. Usylessly Edition Two, contains the two essays from the first edition with an additional visual essay, “Kind of Blue” 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 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 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.

Usylessly Edition Two is the first book published by Ten Thousand Angels Press, a new publishing imprint founded in 2025 by John Morgan. Upcoming titles include Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes: A Selection of Books as Muses, completed shortly before John died, and a long-researched study of the Gallimard Blanche series of books.

[publisher’s note]

Published by Ten Thousand Angels Press, 2025
Design by John Morgan Studio
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