The novel, and its various editions in our collection, helps to provide different examples into the various aspects of book history. That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m not a heavy user of Ulysses when I teach seminars at Fisher, particularly since I can draw on the eighty-some copies of the novel we hold at the library. I periodically pick it up, flip to a random page or two and read from it (often aloud, to hear the cadence of Joyce’s language) – but I will then conclude that I’m still not intellectually ready for the commitment, so I return it to the shelf. I still have it in my bookshelf, the spine barely bent.

I have a copy, gifted at Christmas by my parents when I was a teenager and aspired to be a more 'serious' reader, but I never made it past the first few pages on my first attempt at reading it. I’ll come clean: I’ve never read Ulysses.

(Purportedly it’s also the day when he has his first sexual encounter with his future wife Nora Barnacle.) This year’s Bloomsday is even more special since we are also celebrating the centenary of the publication of Ulysses. For those that don’t know why we celebrate Bloomsday on June 16: it’s the day, in 1904, that Joyce sets the novel. Happy Bloomsday! Today is the day that readers, particularly Dubliners, celebrate the work of the Irish writer James Joyce, and particularly the publication of Ulysses, often singled out as the most influential novel of the twentieth century. Through the Revolving Door: Fisher Blog.Guidelines for Filming at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

James joyce bloomsday