Ulysses and the Transformation of Typography

Abstract

Mecsnóber begins chapter 4 by tracing Joyce’s textual attention to visual aspects of printing in Ulysses and places it into the context of the writer’s increased involvement with the production of the first, 1922 edition of the novel. Sharing an interest in textual materiality with much recent critical work, Mecsnóber focuses on one salient visual aspect of Genette’s paratexts and McGann’s bibliographic codes: typeface choice. Mecsnóber identifies a range of typographic functions and highlights Joyce’s insistence on asserting his authorial intentions through interpretive design. Reviewing the design of all significant periodical and book publications of the novel during Joyce’s life as well as some related publicity materials, Mecsnóber also seeks to recover the cultural significance of other visual clues as well, employed to attribute selected qualities to Joyce’s text or to the “little” magazines in which they appeared. Read in the broader context of the typographic transformations of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century print culture, the design of Ulysses editions shows the enabling impact of the historicist fine printing movement arising out of William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement, progressive design movements like New Typography, and the surge in the production and international exchange of typographic resources.