At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than 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 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 identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, 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, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.

“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.”

“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.’”

“Beyond its value as a contribution to the broader history of the book, Piper’s relational study of the book aims to reassess today’s pervasive discourse of anxiety about the end of book culture in the digital age, suggesting instead that the book and the computer (along with other media) have existed and will continue to coexist side by side.”