"It had been redesigned by Morgan and the anecdote was about a panel of commissioners who passed a mock-up of the book between them and, rather than looking at its design, competed with each other to see how much damage they could do; trying to tear, drop, hold up by a single leaf, scuff, shake and, ultimately, throw it across the room. Morgan, meanwhile, looked on mortified, his meticulous work being brutalised."
"One of his final books was Usylessly, an exact replica of the first 1922 edition of James Joyce's Ulysses but stripped of its text. Instead, among the mostly blank pages were essays about the book, about the journeys, idiosyncrasies and fates of the original editions. It is an incisive, funny and revealing exercise about literary classics, which understands them less as static and stable markers of cultural value and more as snowballs gathering material and damage and the traces of use as they roll"
At John Morgan's funeral a vicar recounted a story about a redesigned book of Common Worship that commissioners brutally tested by tearing, dropping, scuffing and throwing a mock-up while Morgan watched mortified, later making a film, Blank Dummy. Morgan loved books as objects and cherished their material forms rather than only their texts. He produced Usylessly, a replica of the 1922 Ulysses stripped of text and filled with essays on editions and their journeys. He was born in Galgate in 1973, studied graphic design and communication at the University of Reading, and developed a lasting passion for design history while teaching and meeting his wife, Claire Burton.
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