Design Myles Quin, UEO, 2025;
368pp, four-colour, softcover with gold hot-foil embossing, numbered edition of 500
Celebrating the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s epic Ulysses, Arts Over Borders and BNWP commissioned 18 award-winning writers to create works about their home city loosely inspired by Joyce’s epic. It also sent 30 artists to the four (or rather eighteen) corners of Europe and helped produce new performative works in 18 cities : a contemporary creative odyssey lasting over three years.
UEO situated Joyce’s groundbreaking work in a modern context and stressed its ongoing relevance and reach. Inspired by Joyce’s love of mashing up pre-existing forms and styles, and the diversity of writing in the anthology, the starting point for the book’s aesthetic was the great Ulysses book designs of the past 100 years – with nods to the beautiful work of Reichl, McKnight Kauffer, Mendelsund, the Polish rejigging of Gill’s Homeric bow and Darantière's 1922 first edition – but rather than making a dry homage to them, they’d be a springboard to a modern vision. A key theme was the idea of odyssey, migration, – art, ideas and people in movement – across the ocean of Europe. The O of odyssey is a recurring motif, evoking… the journey out and back; circles and cycles; time and movement and the full stop; island cities, but also constellations (see cover and endpaper city constellations that, on the last page, evolve into the migrations of the Joycean 'yes'); maps and navigation; moons and stars. As with Homer, Joyce and UEO, the end is a new beginning. The design itself is an odyssey - a new journey.
A full (and more amusing?) description of the design process and Joyce’s colour schema can be found in James Joyce Invented Hip-Hop included in the ‘Appendices’ to the book, and is also visible here.
