They Said "Yes" to the T'wenties
 

CHESTER G. ANDERSON
 

<■ \l y ES,' and never 'no' was our answer to the fabulous
ll twenties," writes Caresse Crosby in her memoir. The
JI Passionate Years. She and her husband Harry said "yes"
to the same decade that gave the world James Joyce's Ulysses, that
sombre-gay book which ends with Molly Bloom's well-known
affirmation: "yes I said yes I will Y'es." The yea-sayers meet in the
inscribed copy (No. 32) of the special limited issue (100 copies
on Dutch handmade paper) of the first edition of Ulysses (1922),
presented to Columbia this year by Mr. John .M. Crawford, Jr.,
in memory of the late Jack Harris Samuels.

The copy itself has been per¬
fectly preserved in a binding of
full blue morocco, tooled in gold,
over the first-edition cover of
Grecian blue paper with white
lettering. The binding bears the
Crosby coat-of-arms overlaid
with the intimate acrostic made
of the names, Harry and Caresse.
Beginning with the elegant
binding, then, the student who
holds the book in his hands can
muse on the different kinds of
things to which the Joyces and
the Crosbys—especially Molly
Bloom and Caresse Crosby—said
"yes." Their diverse worlds are
evoked by the nine special markings in this copy of Ulysses. They
are discussed below in correspondingly numbered paragraphs.
 

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