Optische Autritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur by Stephanie Gleißner et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Optische Autritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur by Stephanie Gleißner et al. Catriona MacLeod Stephanie Gleißner, Mirela Husiü, Nicola Kaminski, and Volker Mergenthaler. Optische Autritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2019. 243 pp. The second, collaboratively authored volume of, at last count, six impressive books to have emerged from the DFG research group on German Journalliteratur [End Page 193] based in Bochum, Optische Auftritte brings to vivid life the market competition among books, Unterhaltungsblätter, almanacs, and gift books from the first boom of serial literary publications around 1800 to the ebbing appeal of such works by midcentury. By that late phase, August Wilhelm Schlegel's comments on the Taschenbuch in his Flaxman essay of 1799 appeared to have come home to roost: Schlegel had disparaged its small format, "unpoetic" genre illustrations, and a seeming disconnection between text and image in its pages. (Of course, at this time engravings still had to be printed and bound separately into the Taschenbuch—until wood engraving began to take over in the 1840s allowing text and image to be printed together on a single page.) The overall chronological orientation of Optische Auftritte is insightfully complemented by a dazzling sequence of seven detailed geographical case studies centered punctually on the most important publication centers and their often competitive interactions: Berlin (1802–04), Stuttgart (1816–17), Vienna (1825–28), Vienna and Leipzig (1825–27), Leipzig (1838–40), Vienna and Pesth (1840–42), and finally Berlin once again (1847–48). It would have been useful for the reader, however, if the thematic emphases of these individual chapters had been added to the title headings in the table of contents (e.g., the Taschenbuch as art gallery in the chapter "Wien/Leipzig 1825–27"), especially since there is no index. The stage is set with a brilliant analysis by Kaminski and Mergenthaler of E. T. A. Hoffmann's panoramic Gendarmenmarkt narrative "Des Vetters Eckfenster," first published serially in 1822 in the Berlin weekly paper Der Zuschauer. As Hoffmann's story shows, publications such as Der Zuschauer are part of a dynamic and changeable literary marketplace; as material objects, Taschenbücher are also aware of their own marketability as desirable fashion items promoted at fall book fairs in time for Christmas, and they even can be said to stage themselves self-reflexively as marketplaces. Befitting the title, Optische Auftritte, one of the most attractive but also illuminating aspects of this book is its rich color illustration. The volume builds on recent scholarship on illustration that views illustrations not as secondary or supplementary but as constitutive, meaning-making parts of the book culture to which they became integral in the nineteenth century (Günter Oesterle has referred to the "Bebilderungsprogramm" that was a driver of literary culture). While many of the journals discussed could, to be sure, be accessed online, the selections made in this volume highlight information that could not be conveyed by scrolling through individual issues on digital library platforms. In many cases, it is a matter of helpful visual comparisons between journals (focusing on illustrations, bindings, typography, mise-en-page, format, and other elements, including in one case even glued-in mirrors). To cite only one especially striking example, in the section on Brockhaus's 1839 telling switch to book format for the prestige Taschenbuch Urania, the reader can scan, as if it were on a bookshelf, a neat line-up of colorfully bound sextodecimo volumes, culminating in the visual surprise, the outsize, sparely elegant octavo publication of the Neue Folge—what Kaminski terms a "Mesalliance." At the same time, the title Optische Auftritte, with its announced (and superbly realized) focus on the visual components of journals and Taschenbücher, does not do full justice to the subtle interpretive readings woven throughout the text that reveal the constant, symbiotic interplay between literary texts, illustrations, and medial self-reflection, which did not end even as the tensions between art and economics intensified and such publications started to pass out of fashion [End Page 194] themselves. A fashion plate in the Wiener Zeitschrift of 1842, for example, which published serial...