Dreaming in Books - uncopy

Hypothesis: All is Leaf.
—J. W. Goethe
INTRODUCTION
Bibliographic Subjects
Surveying the changes that had been wrought on the German book market
over the previous forty years, the writer Wolfgang Menzel observed in 1828:
“If a citizen of the next century were to look back at the current moment in
German history, he would say that we had slept and dreamt in books.” 1 On
one level, Menzel was offering a familiar critique about how Germans had
failed to participate in the political upheavals that had emerged in France
at the close of the eighteenth century. While the French were modernizing
their political system, the Germans had been busy reading. 2 On another
level, however, Menzel was making an acute argument about the new power
of books that had arisen alongside other historic changes such as the French
Revolution. For Menzel the idea of a reading revolution was a very palpable
one. Books were not only endowed with the capacity to put individuals to
sleep—to draw their attention away from reality—they also had the power
to shape their dreams, to structure their thoughts and their imaginations.
Menzel had signifi cantly titled his essay “The Mass of Literature,” and what
seemed to lend the book both its soporifi c and supplementary force was
precisely its looming ubiquity. It was the massness of the book in Menzel’s
view that had transformed it into both a problem and an enormously powerful
medium that had the capacity to shape one’s dreams.