Rare images of the Freeman's Journal premises visited by Bloom in 1904 in Joyce's Ulysses have just surfaced, writes Terence Killeen
'Hell of a racket they make," thinks Leopold Bloom as he passes through the printing rooms of the Freeman's Journal in the seventh episode of Ulysses. The "racket" he is referring to (and the word is not too strong) is the noise of the printing presses in operation, along with that of the "clanking" (Bloom's term) Linotype machines as they produce the metal type that will be used for the production of that evening's newspaper.
The Freeman's Journal offices of 1904 were in Prince's Street North, opposite the south side of the GPO. (It was the core of the building occupied by the Irish Independent offices until recently.) It has always been very hard for a reader to visualise this episode of Ulysses; the building was largely destroyed in 1916, being so near the GPO.
No useful photographs have been available until now; but thanks to the diligence of David Pierce, recently retired lecturer in English in York, and a man with strong Irish connections, two photographs contemporary with Ulysses have now surfaced.
He obtained them on eBay, apparently from a Kilkenny antiques shop owner, and the photographs will appear in his soon-to-be-published book, Reading Joyce.
One photograph shows the caseroom, as it was called, with the Mergenthaler Linotype operators, dressed with a formality that underlined the importance of their craft, seated at these massive machines.
Here they typed from copy and produced a line (hence Linotype) of metal type, which fell into a tray. The machine, invented in Boston in 1884, enabled operators to set a line of type five times faster than had been possible previously.
THE OTHER PHOTOGRAPH shows the compositors, who "made up" the pages, at work on the "stone", distributing the metal type into the page forms according (in theory) to a layout design. From this metal page an impression would be taken, from which the paper sheets of the journal would be printed. Bloom sees the compositors in action: "He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter [properly speaking, a compositor] neatly distributing type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that." (It did.)
Identification of the Freeman's Journal setting was aided by the fact that Vincent Caprani, grandson of a printer mentioned by Bloom, Menotti Caprani (spelt as "Cuprani" in every edition of Ulysses except Joyce scholar Danis Rose's, naturally), was able to recognise his grandfather from the group of printers when the image was blown up, thanks to a family resemblance.
Joycean discoveries, like Dublin buses, sometimes come in pairs: coincidentally, the recent digitisation of the 1911 census has enabled me (finally) to track down Alfred H Hunter, the prototype of Leopold Bloom. It turns out his profession is "advertising agent", like Bloom's, and his wife's first name is Marion, like Bloom's wife.
Ulysses, it seems, is even more down to the Dublin earth than we thought.
Thanks to Vivien Igoe and Vincent Caprani for their assistance