About this title: To great writers, Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labour their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: First Thus
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Belknap Press/ Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1999
Description: Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. First Thus Edition. NF/NF. Hardcover, quarter cloth with blue gilt titles, DJ, 1073 pp, light edgewear with jacket closed tear repaired with tape, else a clean and crisp copy. Protected in a Brodart cover. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
Date Published: 1999
Description: 10 x 6.5, cloth backed pict boards, 1073 pp, minor extremity wear else a nice copy in extremity-worn dust jacket with small tear at top of front panel. FIRST ED THUS. read more
Description: Fine. 0674008022. Translators: Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Contents include: Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Arcades of Paris, Expose of 1935, Materials for "Arcades, " read more
"This is the kind of book you are always currently reading, because this is the kind of book that is almost impossible to read entirely, and once you've read it you need to start reading again. Fragmented and brilliant, sometimes confusing but always worthwhile, this book will come back to you again and again. It's supposedly a history of bourgeois Paris in the 1800s, but really it's a history of people, of culture and consumerism, of replication and lights, of wandering the city and modernity and why we are now what we are now because of how they were back then."
"I have read this book both in the original and in translation several times. My copy is falling apart but I can not find a suitable replacement in the library or in used book stores, aquizition of a new one is cost prohibitive. I find myself lost in the endless explications and musings until I often am surprised when looking up to not find the glass and metal skeleton of an actual arcade. I try to read some of it every day."
"This was Benjamin's great unfinished project. The reconstruction done here is worth looking through but i think of less value then Susan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing', an amazing work based on the Arcades Project, as well as her extensive research on Benjamin's life and philosophy."
"Okay, I didn't read the book in its entirety (who could?) But, the article "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" and the fragments compiled as the arcade project that I did read made it well worth the worth the time spent digging through. The book certainly provides a beautiful and compelling fragmented glimpse into the possibility for a history of below from the gorgeous mind of Benjamin and makes one wonder what history from below would have looked like had Benjamin completed his work. Such a project, would have certainly been finished decades before The Making of the English Working Class.
Props to Georges Bataille for holding onto this one in the Bibliothèque Nationale. What a guy."
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