![Ulysse (Fragment) [in “900” Cahiers d’Italie et D’Europe 1. Cahier d’Automne 1926, ed. Massimo BONTEMPELLI et al. by LYDIS, Mariette, illustrator. (James JOYCE). [Auguste MOREL, translator].](https://images.vialibri.net/production/26/7715---height_450.jpg?v=1727513442)
LYDIS, Mariette, illustrator. (James JOYCE). [Auguste MOREL, translator]. ~ Ulysse (Fragment) [in “900” Cahiers d’Italie et D’Europe 1. Cahier d’Automne 1926, ed. Massimo BONTEMPELLI et al. Rome and Florence: “La Voce”, 1926
8vo (192 × 130 mm), pp. 203, [13] (including adverts), the Ulysses fragment on pp. 107-131, illustrations. Original yellow wrappers. Contemporary bookseller’s stamp to upper cover (Les Arts et le Livre, Paris). Slightly dust-stained and with creasing to the spine, upper cover detached, but still a good copy of this fragile journal.
The earliest portrait of Leopold Bloom. Mariette Lydis published this image in the first issue of the journal 900 with the fragment of Ulysses in the French translation by Auguste Morel. It is dated 1925 in the lower corner. No earlier illustration of Bloom is known (nor indeed any earlier illustration of Ulysses) and it predates Joyce’s famous but inept sketch of him made in Paris in 1926. Lydis’s Bloom was introduced (by us) in The James Joyce Broadsheet (issue 121, February 2022) and discussed in the Times Literary Supplement 6167 (11 June 2021).
Joyce was nominally a joint editor of the radical literary review 900 with Massimo Bontempelli. Mariette Lydis was Bontempelli’s lover at this period having separated from her second husband, Jean Lydis in 1925. Mariette knew Joyce and sketched his portrait the following year in Paris. Slocum & Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (953), D25 (p. 113).