ABSTRACT
I have another big one for you now: 933 pages in the Penguin edition, and it comes with a fearsome reputation for being difficult. Have no fear. Would I offer you something unreadable? Certainly not. And, furthermore, it is another of my favourite, indispensable bedside books. Comparable to, well, Plumtree's potted meat. Plumtree's what? One of the joys of reading Ulysses is that you collect hundreds of little phrases, rhymes, puns, jokes, etc., which become treasured additions to the bric-a-brac on the mental mantelpiece. Some of them come from advertisements that were to be found in Dublin newspapers on 16 June 1904, which is where and when the story takes place. For example:
So that explains the Plumtree thing. Well, not entirely, because it has all sorts of other meanings, like everything else in Ulysses, but let's not worry about that just now. It is time for a brief account of the background of the book and then I'll tell you how I discovered it.
