Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age

Publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin churned out books in increasing quantities at the turn of the nineteenth century. The era's "bookish" culture was not just a result of mass printing, but also owed a crucial debt to romantic writing and writers, according to Andrew Piper. This played an essential role in acclimatizing readers to a literary environment that was increasingly international and overflowing. The proliferation of books was not just a result of technological, commercial, and legal conditions, but also the product of symbolic operations contained within books. This was how readers learned to use and desire books. The book "Dreaming in Books" examines novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities that created them, to tell a comprehensive story of the book's identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age, but actually emerged with particular urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. Revisiting the rise of the book through the lens of romantic literature, Piper seeks to challenge our assumptions about romanticism, the printed book as a medium, and ultimately, the future of the book in the so-called digital age.

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