‘I'll take this one,’ Bloom says to the shopman. His choice of Sweets of Sin to fulfill his errand for Molly, at the heart of both city and novel, signals first a moment of transportation in which Bloom, as reader, nearly loses the run of himself, and then a fleeting masculine decisiveness, a ‘mastering’ of his ‘troubled’ breath (U 10.638-9). This act will place both Bloom and Molly within a series about which the narrator of ‘Ithaca’ might well have asked a question: who else has read this book? Fictionally, at least, the shopman has, but also, no one has, since Sweets of Sin does not exist beyond the pages of Joyce's novel. Then again, it might be as well to say that anyone who has read Ulysses has therefore also read Sweets of Sin. The invited confusion between character-as-reader and ‘actual’ reader renders the question ‘Who has read this book?’ more difficult than it might appear. In fact, the question is asked a few pages later by Stephen Dedalus, about an unnamed text at a different bookcart. ‘Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me?’ (U 10.545-6). The identification of a readership is one of the classic problems in studies of reception, and one that is further exacerbated when the books in question overtly address this very issue.

When a question similar to Stephen's (‘Who has passed here before me?’) is put in ‘Ithaca’ – ‘What preceding series?’