The Arcades Project

First edition in English. Pp. xiv, 1073, [1]. Quarter-bound black buckram over blue pictorial paper boards, stamped in blue foil to spine; blue endpapers. In a die-cut black dustjacket, embossed in blue and gold. Frontis., b/w photos & illus., addenda, notes, guide to names & terms, index.

Prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann and itself volume 5 of Walter Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften, compiled with the co-operation of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem.

Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture (1830–1870), this is an inventive reconstruction of Das Passagen-Werk, as it might have taken form. "More than half a century after it was composed, Walter Benjamin's fragmentary Arcades Project still surpasses all other historiographic projects on the nineteenth century and its capital, Paris." –Werner Hamacher, author of Premises