Usylessly, edition one, a work by John Morgan, is the result of a close observation of the blue cover and form of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book duplicates the size, bulk and appearance of the 1922 Shakespeare & Co. edition. Everything but the text.

At the heart of the mostly blank 736-page book is a printed 64-page section containing two essays written 27 years apart by Edward L. Bishop. The first, ‘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 in Usylessly, edition one, for the first time, starts its journey in the archive of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas with over 40 copies of the 1922 edition and follows Morgan and Bishop on the quest for the blue cover.

This edition is out of print since February 2022. A second edition of 2,000 numbered copies, containing the two essays by Edward L. Bishop with an additional visual essay, ‘Kind of Blue’ by John Morgan, was published in October 2025.

An archival website about the project is maintained at usylessly.com