Shut your eyes and see. See a blue I have tried to reach many times in my own practice. It’s the blue James Joyce devised for the first edition of Ulysses, with white type to signify the colours of sea, sky and Greece. Joyce explained in a letter (quoted in translation) to Alessandro Francini Bruni: “The colours of the binding (chosen by me) will be white letters on a blue field – the Greek flag though really of Bavarian origin and imported with the dynasty. Yet in a special way they symbolise the myth well – the white islands scattered over the sea”. Ulysses was published in fragile but beautiful form under the imprint of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris on the 2nd of February, 1922 – the author’s fortieth birthday. Arriving at the exact shade of blue Joyce desired was a lengthy and arduous process for Maurice Darantière, an established printer in Dijon. His search took him to Germany where he discovered the right blue but the wrong paper. Material colour – perhaps a little more honest than printed colour – couldn’t be found, so he solved the problem by lithographing the colour onto white stock, leaving a thin white edge and the reverse unprinted. A mythical blue, out of which white chiselled Elzévir capitals rise like the rocks of Ithaca, or do they float as William H. Gass sees them, “like a chain of white islands, petals shaken on a Greek sea.”

John Morgan, Blue Revue, published by Blue Mountain School, 2018