Piper 2009

Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Introduction: Bibliographic Subjects

"Hypothesis: All is Leaf." -- J. W. Goethe

books <--> literature

"Learning how to read books and how to want books did not simply occur through the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible. The making of such bibliographic fantasies was also importantly a product of the very narratives and symbolic operations contained within books as well. It was through romantic literature where individuals came to understand themselves." (4)

"bibliographic surplus" at the turn of the 19th century (5)

• increasing diversity of books and bibliographic formats circulating
• increasing homogeneity of geography; books translated across multiple sites (6)

using bibliographic imagination of 19c to understand digital present (7)

"A study of how nineteenth-century individuals became wedded to or possessed by their books can broaden our perspective of the nature of 'new media' cultures and historical experiences of 'media transition. It can offer parallels, but also differences, to our current process of adapting to communicative change." (7)

emphasizing continuities between bookish past and digital present; similarities:

• the notion of a network
• the status of the "copy"
• remediating culture data into new forms
• creativity as intermedial thinking/making (7-8)

these communicative practices "came into being" during the romantic age (8)

"The digital provides us wit ha critical lens to see the bibliographic with fresh eyes. But my own work is driven by an alternative desire to show us how the history of books, and romantic books in particular, can help us contextualize our understanding of digital or new media today." (8)