Ireland’s literature celebrated a milestone last weekend with a new museum that playfully features another literary milestone. The very first copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, inscribed to his patron, is on display at the newly-opened Museum of the Literature of Ireland, which goes by the shorthand of MoLI.
And it’s no accident that the name is a play on the name of Molly Bloom, a featured character in Joyce’s classic novel. The blue-bound book, according to Simon O’Connor, director of the new museum, “was the first copy handed to James Joyce on February 22nd, 1922. He inscribed it to his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had paid for everything – for his life – and handed it to her.”
But Joyce and Joyceana are not all the museum, housed in three updated buildings in St Stephens Green that were the original home of University College Dublin, has to offer. There are exhibits on other authors such as William Butler Yeats, Flann O’Brien, Maeve Binchy and more, as well as thematic exhibits such as one on Irish writers in Paris,
The site also includes a hidden garden cafe, screening rooms, performance spaces and research facilities.
