Bloomsday: James Joyce reads an excerpt from "Ulysses"

On the occasion of "Bloomsday" , the annual celebration of June 16 for fans of James Joyce, we present a short audio recording of the author reading an excerpt from his novel Ulysses.

From the Morgan Library & Museum:

This is one of the two recordings of Joyce’s voice—a reading of John F. Taylor’s speech from the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, recited by the author in a Cork accent. Sylvia Beach, who commissioned the disc, had planned to invite journalists to the session, but the producer at the record label His Master’s Voice was not interested in publicity.

He foresaw no profit (voice recordings by authors were anomalies in 1924) and insisted the label’s name be kept out of it. Of the twenty or thirty pressings Beach authorized, all but a handful soon broke into pieces.

To this day, it remains Joyce and Beach’s rarest “publication.”

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