Lesen. Kopieren. Schreiben. Lese- und Exzerpierkunst in der europäischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts ed. by Elisabeth Décultot, and: Book Was There. Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper, and: Wissensräume. Bibliotheken in der Literatur ed. by Mirko Gemmel and Margrit Vogt (review)

The volumes under review mark three different areas of attention to reading, its objects, its representations, and its concomitant practices. Décultot’s volume directs our attention to processes of knowledge assembly, archiving, and production; Piper’s reflections help map and contribute to the current surge of interest in the materiality and mediality of reading; Wissensräume focuses on representations of books and their archives in literary texts.

Elisabeth Décultot’s edited volume on excerpting, note-taking, and assembling “common-place books” as practiced in the eighteenth century was originally published in French in 2003 (CNRS Editions, Paris). The translation into German (with an updated introduction on the “art of excerpting”) should help secure the wider readership among Germanists internationally that the volume deserves. Looking for an orientation on this topic, one could hardly do better than turn to Décultot’s authoritative and informative introduction to the genre variously termed “miscellanies,” “common-place books,” or “waste books” (Sudelbücher). It combines overview and enlightening detail, includes a historical survey (9–16), touches on the tricky issue of sorting entries, sketches possible taxonomies (17–20), discusses the uneasy relationship between excerpting and memory (21–25), explores the trajectory toward increasing subjectivity in the eighteenth century (25–35), shows how efficiently these collections were mined in the service of text production (35–39), summarizes the tradition of warnings against excerpting as a mindlessly derivative practice (40–44), and makes a persuasive plea for more studies of this underappreciated genre (44–47).

A dozen contributions (among them a chapter on Winckelmann by Décultot that is also included in the 2013 volume by Gemmel and Vogt reviewed below, reprinted here with acknowledgment) flesh out and elaborate on these aspects, starting with Anthony Grafton’s general overview on humanistic excerpting and the insights it permits into how “that marvelous tool, the book” (49), was used by early modern, readers. Helmut Zedelmaier provides illuminating physical details of Zettelschrank and Zettelkasten as filing systems. Catherine Volpilhac-Auger reports on current editorial work on Montesquieu’s collections of excerpts and the different forms and shapes his “handwritten library” (125) assumed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher presents Herder’s excerpting practice as a form of “insightful reading” (196), and Sven Aage Jørgensen points out parodic-subversive forms of citing and annotating in Johann Georg Hamann’s work.

Along with such early modern luminaries as Erasmus of Rotterdam, John Locke, and Daniel Georg Morhof, no volume on eighteenth century excerpting would be complete without contributions on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (here situated persuasively by Hans-Georg von Arburg between tradition and originality) and Jean Paul (whose playful scholarliness Christian Helmreich explores). A recurring topic is what we could think of as “metaexcerpting,” that is, ways of summarizing or indexing the volumes of excerpts that scholars and authors accumulated by the dozens, if not by the hundreds. Klaus Weimar discusses a striking example of what amounts to an “infinite loop” (109) of indexing indexes. Three chapters on Louis-Sébastien Mercier (by Jean-Claude Bonnet), Wilhelm Heinse (by Sylvie Le Moël), and Shaftesbury (by Lauren Jaffro) round out the volume.

Individual contributions meet scholarly standards and cohere well. They are unified by an emphasis already indicated by the title: many of them...