Introduction to the ninth issue

This ninth issue of the James Joyce Online Notes includes seventeen articles, and brings the total number of articles published in the series to two hundred and sixty. Harald Beck publishes details of a previously unknown correspondence between Joyce and the sculptor August Suter, to which access has been generously granted by the sculptor’s grandsons.

In the Ithaca episode Joyce describes Bloom in the style of a Dublin lost-dog advert. But the text was actually based on a curious and real advertisement run in the Dublin papers in 1902. See A missing gent answering to the name of Bloom for the details. A comparable article identifies the source of Joyce’s horror headline A child bit by a bellows in Aeolus.

Bob Janusko examines the origins of Hamlet’s sledded poleaxe, and further articles explore brown-paper suits, a death at the Queen’s Hotel, Ennis (“where Rudolph Bloom […] died”), and the variable price of Abram coal.

Bob also suggested that, as well carrying a list of the contents of Joyce’s Trieste library – with links to the original texts (and, wherever possible, the original editions owned by Joyce) – we might do the same for Joyce’s Paris library. In line with the policy and preference of this site, we have now provided a linked list for the Paris library, including those books published (or presented to Joyce) before the publication of Ulysses. So readers may be interested in clicking through, for instance, to a facsimile of the Dollard Printing House’s Souvenir of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Opening of the Gaiety Theatre 27th November,1871 or Raphaël Petrucci’s Les peintres chinois.

Harald Beck

John Simpson

September 2015