Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination In the Romantic Age University of Chicago Press, 2009 Winner, MLA Prize for a First Book Honorable Mention, Harry Levin Prize, ACLA Read deleted scenes This book is about the remarkable social investment that was made in books, both materially and imaginatively, at the turn of the nineteenth century across Europe and North America. As books streamed in ever greater numbers from publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in facilitating readers’ adaptation to this increasingly international and overflowing bookish environment. Learning how to use and 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 importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well. Examining novels, critical and collected editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book's many identities at the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Dreaming in Books revises our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book. "Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books opens a new understanding of the history of the book as simultaneously historical and literary. With its scope and meticulous research, it documents the way the technologies of book production become ways to structure culture itself, and shows how the dawn of mass communication made books part of human relationships. Books, we see, sit at the very center of a Romantic culture that extends even into the digital age. This book itself will be of lasting value to scholars of book history, Romanticism, and literary studies.” —Barbara M. Benedict, Trinity College “Andrew Piper’s sustained interdisciplinary venture in the material and literary culture of print circulation fuses book studies and literary history in an arresting new meld. With the manifold interactions, public and private, of an expanding literacy found rehearsed within one text after another, the Romantic book studies itself. Brought to a provocative focus in the rear-view mirror of electronic textuality and intermedia research, Dreaming in Books, as its double-edged title suggests, illuminates not only the particular mental landscapes released by reading but the social imaginary of bookhood all told. No one working in the crossover field of bibliographic and literary study can afford to ignore Piper’s original approach; no one working in either field separately can fail to learn from it.” —Garret Stewart, author of The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text “This is the book that book history itself has been waiting for—a confirmation of that field’s capacity to construct vividly new literary histories. Dreaming in Books takes as its subject not just particular texts or particular practices—though examples of both abound—but an entire environment: the ‘international and overflowing bookish environment’ of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Romanticism emerges from Andrew Piper’s capacious analyses as more than the sum of its authors, lyrics, and novels. In these pages, it is the period in which the book took on its ‘cosmological identity as something that was everywhere and contained everything.’ Piper provides a natural history of the life form that comes to populate that cosmos—the bibliographic subject—and then concludes with a brilliant meditation on its remediated fate in the present: our own era of ‘translational humanism.’” —Clifford Siskin, New York University and director of the Re:Enlightenment Project at New York University and the New York Public Library “Andrew Piper’s exploration of the bibliographic imaginary deftly interweaves book history, media theory, visual studies, and textual interpretation. His critical voice is at once erudite and enthusiastic, his method both descriptive and allegorical. With remarkable intellectual agility, he moves from the center to the periphery of the canon, from literature (in the inherited sense of the term) to science to scholarship, and from past to present. Under his gaze, dedications, editions, translations, and, especially, the practices surrounding them become the focus of compelling cultural-historical insight. Romanticism emerges here as stranger than we had ever thought and yet surprisingly close to contemporary concerns. A fine achievement.” —David E. Wellbery, University of Chicago