Two books by John Morgan
John died last year, very prematurely, with a brain tumor. (Among the obituaries for him, see here and here. Elsewhere I have written about how I knew him.) This piece will look at two books that he worked on – as writer and designer – in his last months and which have been published by the imprint that he established in his last year: Ten Thousand Angels Press.
The title Baskerville’s teardrop explodes is a good example of John’s humour: ‘teardrop’ describes one of the characteristics of John Baskerville’s types – teardrop terminals that look as if they might pull away from the stroke and drop off the letter altogether; and ‘tears’ (pronounced ‘tairs’) are imperfections in paper caused by drops falling on the material before it dries and sets. From all this, one understands why he enjoyed James Joyce’s writing.
The book’s subtitle is ‘a selection of books as muses’. Baskerville’s teardrop explodes shows 31 books or magazine issues that provided inspiration for John in his own work as book designer – these are his ‘muses’. They are shown here in immaculate photographs: sometimes just the front cover, sometimes also with representative spreads from inside the book. He writes short explanations for his choices – all of them have a certain ‘object quality’, and most of them are objects that embody their content appropriately. Or one could put this the other way around: most of them have content that is well embodied in the object. Others are, he explains, just here for their inspiration as objects or for some particular bit of exemplary construction or manufacture.1 He writes that most of his purely literary inspirations are not here at all.
I won’t try to describe this book fully. The range of works chosen is wide: from the extravagantly fashionable (the French Vogue magazine editions devoted to Roman Polanski and Marlene Dietrich – together given 48 pages) to the discrete and self-effacing (Eric Gill’s Art nonsense, given 8 pages). The seemingly timeless (but in fact mid-twentieth-century) paper-covered books published Gallimard, Éditions de Minuit, Jean-Jacques Pauvert are, for me, the highlight of this selection. It is fine to see them celebrated by this English designer.
A paper-covered work published in Paris between the two world wars is the subject of the last two choices in Baskerville’s teardrop explodes: James Joyce’s Ulysses. This book was published first in 1922 by Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare & Company, in an edition of 1,000 copies. The copy shown in this book belongs to the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center at Austin. John also shows his own copy of the third printing of the Shakespeare & Company edition.
Editions of Ulysses are the subject of the second book, Usylessly. This title comes from Joyce himself: his ‘usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles’ is the description in Finnegans wake, his even more ‘unreadable’ novel.2 Usylessly began life with the book of this title that John Morgan published in December 2021. This was a re-creation of the physical body of the first edition of Ulysses, the book published by Shakespeare & Co in 1922. So, it had 736 pages, the same page size, similar binding, and a cover that emulated the cover and design of the model of 1922. Here John was following his own advice to students, that one way to learn something is to copy a model as exactly as you can: ‘you could start by looking closer and copying it exactly. Not a little, I mean do it exactly as the original. You’ll still miss and it will become something new, so why not start by aiming for something exactly the same.’3
The first edition of Usylessly contained two essays by Edward L. Bishop: ‘Re-covering Ulysses’ and ‘Ulysses blue’.4 For the rest of the book, the pages were left blank, so that the required extent of 736 pages could be reached. This second edition runs to just 120 pages, in which the two essays by Bishop are reprinted. A third piece – John’s visual essay ‘Kind of blue’, on the first Ulysses, its cover, on blueness, and on the making of the present book – is now added. All this is certainly interesting, informative and beautifully organized and presented.
Bishop’s account, in his second essay, describing his and John’s visit to the Ransom Center archive, which holds 40 copies of the first printing of Ulysses, is fascinating. We learn about the histories of particular copies of the book, and, for example, we read about Sylvia Beach’s defence of her bookshop stock in 1941, during the German occupation of Paris. Bishop ends this essay with a microscopic analysis of one particular, very worn copy of the book.
With Bishop’s first essay, ‘Re-covering Ulysses’, first published in the Joyce Studies Annual of 1994, I have some gripes. Here he looks at the covers of the book as published in editions from the first in 1922 through to an edition of 1993 published by Oxford University Press. Apart from his informative descriptions and enumerations of the early editions – in the 1920s and 1930s – I’m not sure how much we really learn from his focus on the covers. We do see how the book passed from its innocent early editions, through its introduction to and acceptance by general trade publishers, then on to its elevation as a classic text published in critical and also more or less mass-market editions. But I don’t believe an analysis of this journey needs the quotations from authories that Bishop uses as supports for his discussion: Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jerome McGann, and more. The closer he sticks to a simple description of the objects, their materials, their textual components, and their place in lived historical events – the better. The essay is thirty years’ old, and comes from a time when some university English teachers were becoming aware of the material dimension of literature. Unrevised here, it does feel dated in respect of its citation of authorities, and in its now limited time-span: thirty years’ worth of publication history is left out.
I did once read Ulysses, also Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce, but had remembered little about its publishing history before being informed by Usylessly. The edition I have is the Bodley Head publication issued (according to its colophon) in 1960. I would think that this was a significant edition. The same publisher had issued its first edition in 1936, as is described here by Bishop (pp. 29–31). Bodley Head was then in the process of evolving from a limited edition publisher to a publisher of ordinary trade editions, and this can be seen in its first two editions of Ulysses: an edition of 1,000 copies in 1936, and an unlimited edition in 1937. This became the first UK edition to be issued by such a generalist firm.
Bishop does refer to the further printings that the Bodley Head issued of their reset edition of 1960. But he doesn’t name or discuss that edition, because he is now just interested in the jacket design. He picks on a printing of 1966 that used photographs from Joseph Strick’s film version of the book. The film was issued only the next year, 1967, but Bishop doesn’t remark on what was therefore an anticipation by the publisher of the film adaptation.
For any typographer, the interest of the Bodley Head’s edition of 1960 is in its elegant page design by the firm’s art director and in-house designer John Ryder. He was a distinguished figure of the traditionalist British typography of that period: enlightened and open to Continental-European influences (his wife, Herta, a literary agent, had left Germany just before the start of the Second World War). Of special interest is the use of a version of Monotype Plantin, with ascenders and descenders that are longer than those of the familar Monotype Plantin (series 110). This type was commissioned by Francis Meynell for his Nonesuch Press publications. It can be seen in the printing shown here (seventh impression, with corrections, 1967), though the photographic reprint from the pages of the first printing weakens the image of the type.
When Bishop reaches the editions published by Penguin Books, he seems again to miss something of interest. He describes at some length the front and back covers of the firm’s publication in 1986 of the ‘corrected text’ of Ulysses edited by Hans Walter Gabler. This edition is still in print, though of course with a different cover, from the same publisher, in its present formation as Penguin Random House. But Bishop writes: ‘After the “scandal” over the Gabler Ulysses Penguin discretely issued a new printing to replace the 1986 version.’ (p. 40) He shows the cover of this edition, now put into its then current Penguin Modern Classics series style, and describes the ‘gritty photograph’ of Dublin used on that cover.
There is a more interesting story about Penguin editions of Ulysses, which was well told by the late Phil Baines in his Penguin by design: a cover story, 1935–2005 (London: Allen Lane, 2005, p. 158). The first Penguin edition of the book was published in 1969, at a moment of celebration. This was the fiftieth anniversary of the entry into publishing of the firm’s founder, Allen Lane, and it would be no. 3,000 in Penguin’s numbering system for its books. Baines wrote: ‘In 1934, Allen Lane had bought rights to publish Ulysses in its first British edition for The Bodley Head. The other directors of the company disagreed and the brothers [Allen, Richard, and John Lane] bore the financial risk themselves. It appeared in 1936.’5
Baines continued: ‘To emphasize its importance, and unusually for that period, Ulysses was printed in the larger B format. German Facetti wanted the cover to appear in the now-standardized Modern Clasics series design, but Hans Schmoller [in charge of typography at Penguin and a director of the firm] presented the design shown here and used his position to push it through. Purely typographic and deceptively simple it features Jan van Krimpen’s typeface Spectrum (1952) but with redrawn capitals. Although it doesn’t relate to the rest of the Modern Classics – or indeed to anything else art-directed by Facetti – it is a very striking cover and one of the most memorable from that period.’
Phil Baines was primarily a working graphic designer and was able to write with a practitioner’s knowledge of book design and production. Without any need to refer to theorists of the book, I feel he tells us more than they can.
These two books were printed and bound in Italy at Verona Libri. Both are very white in their materials, and simple typographically. In their binding they are interestingly different.
Baskerville’s teardrop explodes (205 x 135 mm, 256 pages) has a satin text paper with coated-on-one-side cover material and feels relatively heavy at 440 gm. It has an Otabind, the sections glued with a visibly thick layer of adhesive that works against easy opening at either end of the book
Usylessly (240 x 195 mm, 120 pages) has uncoated text and cover papers and feels relatively light at 370 gm. The binding is delightful and emulates the bindings of John’s (and my) admired French models. Sections of 8 pages have been trimmed at all edges and only then gathered, so that the three cut edges present a slightly uneven face; then sewn and cold-glued to a cover paper that is hardly thicker or heavier than the text pages, but is strengthened by being folded on each of its three sides. The threads holding the sections together can be seen and felt through the spine – the pleasure of feeling those threads is great. Two thousand copies have been made, and are numbered. So it’s a limited edition, but not in the off-putting sense of that term. The whole thing feels human: an item of medium- rather than mass-production.
John Morgan, Baskerville’s teardrop explodes: a selection of books as muses, Oxford: Ten Thousand Angels Press, 2026
John Morgan, Usylessly, Oxford: Ten Thousand Angels Press, 2025
John fell in love with Norman Potter’s book, What is a designer, as a student, and he chooses the first edition (1969) as a muse. Twenty years before him, also as a student at Reading, I too fell in love with that book and that edition, and then worked with Potter to make a revised and much extended edition. From his description, it seems that John owned and read the third edition, which we published in 1989. It is a poor bit of production, that made me never want to use a British printer again. He writes about its ‘navy-blue cover and orange endpapers’ – the cover is indeed navy blue, and the book has an orange reference section, but no endpapers. He then quotes from the book some words that are not in his preferred first edition, but which we added to the second and following editions. The first edition does body forth the spirit of ‘1968’ – Potter was a very committed participant, joining with the students in their rebellions – in ways that the enlarged and textually improved editions of 1980, 1989, and 2002, can’t really do. In British terms these further editions contended with different zeitgeists: postmodernism, Thatcherism, and Blairism (respectively). Enthusiasts really need to have these significantly different editions: the first, second, and fourth.
I take this from Usylessly, p. 42, where Edward L. Bishop quotes from Jeri Johnson’s introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Ulysses (1993).
Baskerville’s teardrop explodes, p. 109.
Ted – no longer Edward L. – Bishop is an emeritus professor of English of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta and now a writer of books addressed to a wide readership – The social life of ink (2014) and Riding with Rilke (2005). See his website.
A fuller account of the Bodley Head edition of 1936 was written by Jeremy Lewis in his Penguin special: the life and times of Allen Lane, London: Viking, 2005, pp. 60–5.